Allow users to manually trigger ad-hoc workflows for commits
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Justin Pincar
We have a long-running and resource-intensive legacy test/build process. Due to this, true continuous integration is cost prohibitive until we can spend some serious time to address our technical debt. Currently we have "only" filters to limit runs to ci-* branches, so users can push to those in order to trigger a build. This works, but is a bit unintuitive and not a great user flow since we still want the source commit/branch tagged as a green build.
What would be great is if we could see all commits/branches in CircleCI, even if they are skipped, and having the ability to trigger a workflow manually to run against a specific commit.
Another use case is to pick a workflow for a specific branch. E.g. when branch release is green, I would like the ability to choose to run a workflow of either deploy_staging or deploy_production.
I think I can probably accomplish this by specifying workflows with a series of hold/approval steps that we just ignore most of the time, but that sure seems like a hack.
CCI-I-333
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Sebastian Lerner
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https://circleci.com/docs/set-up-multiple-configuration-files-for-a-project/ + https://circleci.com/docs/triggers-overview/#run-a-pipeline-from-the-circleci-web-app
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Sebastian Lerner
This should be achievable by setting up one or many pipelines (and corresponding YML files) in your project https://circleci.com/docs/set-up-multiple-configuration-files-for-a-project/
With that, you can have users select the pipeline they want to run from the "trigger pipeline" button in the CircleCI UI manually instead of running on all pushes. https://circleci.com/docs/triggers-overview/#run-a-pipeline-from-the-circleci-web-app
Let me know if I'm missing something from your scenario that would make the solution described above not sufficient.
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ro fl
this is absolute a must, how can such a basic feature be missing? not everyone wants to trigger workflows conditionally by calling api, this is cumbersome.
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Amjad Amjad
Definitely to run something like Visual Regression tests it's good to have adhoc jobs.
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Daniel Eriksson
This is definitely something we need too. Any update on the progress?
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Nathan Dintenfass
We are previewing a way to drive workflows via the api using parameters. It’s not quite what you have in mind, but I wonder if it would work: https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/api-preview-docs/blob/master/docs/conditional-workflows.md
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Todd Cullen
We're using CircleCI to handle our deployment process. If something goes wrong, I'd like to have a rollback workflow that I can manually trigger.
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Ieuan Ieuan
Similarly we have a number of new git repos being created a new project and CircleCI doesn't execute workflows until it's been enabled on a new repo. Once it's been enabled, it only runs once on master, no other branch.
We now have to do dummy/empty commits to re-trigger CircleCI for branches that didn't run before CircleCI was enabled.
This makes our git history untidy and messes up versioning strategies.
Also, this was requested a while back here (but since was auto-closed):https://discuss.circleci.com/t/how-to-trigger-manual-workflow-runs/13497
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David Chen
Aside from that, github notifications went down yesterday morning. That's another use case for triggering this via the UI (or at least with the API considering it's broken on 2.1)