Does Octopus version your deployment process?

I was asked an interesting question at the Chicago ALM User’s Group tonight. I can’t recall the exact question, but the essence of it was, “does Octopus version your deployment process?” I meant to answer the question but I got side-tracked with another question. So here’s my post to amend that unanswered question.

Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Yeah, sorta. How so? Let me show you. Start by clicking on the Configuration link in the upper right-hand corner within the Octopus UI, and then look for the “Audit” tab on the left-hand side.

The Audit tab by default shows all the most recent events that occurred. Some filtering of projects led me to this alteration of my deployment process as seen below:

Clicking on the “show details” link will display the raw JSON data. I’m showing only a small portion of the data that’s displayed but you should know that Octopus displays the entire JSON data document within the Audit page.

The “yeah” portion of my long answer has to do with _how_ Octopus Deploy shows you the difference between the changes that were made. Octopus shows the raw JSON that’s stored and the alterations that were made highlighted in green or red. Green meaning added and red meaning removed. What’s happening here is that I changed the WebRoot text value in my deployment process from “\” to “d:\apps\OctopusLiveDemo.Web.#{CurrentEnvironment}”. Pretty easy, right?

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is not the most readable of formats for most people but for developers, this is pretty easy. Unfortunately, it’s not obvious what the change is amidst the entirety of the JSON document so you’re forced to scan for the color change to find the exact alteration. This particular example I’m showing has a lot more JSON which I omitted for clarity. Does this qualify as versioning deployments? “Yeah”. It’s a little verbose but for developers, it’s works well.

My “sorta” is in reference to how cumbersome it is to find the needle in the haystack of audit events. Granted, there are a few ways to access in the raw data within Octopus’s RavenDB, you can programmatically find your changes. But my gripe however, is with the filter on the Audit tab as it’s still lacking more filters to obtain this information quickly. I’ve proposed changes for filtering on the UserVoice site and while my change request was added into Octopus, it’s still difficult to find something this specific. Can Octopus Deploy improve on it’s audit filtering? Sure. But in terms of priority, is low on the totem pole of desired features.