Branch Deploy
Where the pipeline tool does not support approval gating, but a review and approval mechanism is desired, the “Pull Request”/“Merge Request” can be used. The resulting approval will rebuild the solution and deliver it to the defined environment.
Branch Based Deployment
There are a variety of methods used within a branch based deployment approach, the following is a common example.
A long-living branch is defined for each target environment, in this example dev, test and release. A source of truth branch exists (main) which does not trigger a deployment.
Unlike Continuous Delivery, a separate build is created for each environment, e.g. #64 in development, #65 in acceptance test, etc.
The long-lived branches provide a high level of concurrency and flexibility to skip stages, or deploy a selected feature or fix (known as “Cherry-picking”).
To “promote” changes from feature to development, then on to test and production, a pull request is raised for each stage. In this scenario it is typically a fellow developer that reviews and approves the change, and not a business user, i.e. Product Owner.
The merge triggers the corresponding build and deploy for the target branch/environment.
