Improvements to deployments

[Christoph Tietz]

Hi there,

currently I configure my pipeline and I found several issues while working with the deployment feature. Here's what:

Why is it not possible to mark a parallel step as a deployment?

I have one step to build my project (composer install) and then two following parallel steps:

I run them in parallel to save time. mortimer is a test stage and it takes a while to provision it, deploy the app and run the tests. So it is a deployment to test and it should be marked as such.

It is even your recommendation to run tests in parallel. Now, UI tests do not run in a black hole, but most of the time you need to spin up some environment and deploy the application there. I don't see why this cannot be part of a parallel step?

Why is it not possible to mark two steps as deployment to the same stage (e.g. staging)?

I have (at least) two staging servers where I want to have the possibility to manually test and review feature branches in isolation. How can I implement this in bitbucket pipelines? What I tried is to mark the two staging deployment steps as trigger: manual. This does not work as:

a) bitbucket restricts the deployment: staging flag to one occurence per pipeline(?)

b) bitbucket would not let me skip one step

It is definitely possible to skip a step in gitlab. For a scenario where I want to trigger manual deployments through the pipeline (which is quite common), this is a must. 

Could you please help me figure out how I can achieve my vision of our pipeline setup or how to work around this?