Deployment and git tag configuration

Before getting started

Before setting up your deployment configurations in Flow, you need to understand your organization’s needs and practices so you can configure your deployments and get the specific data you want in Flow. Have conversations with your teams and leaders to ensure you are on the same page about the data you want to see in Flow and how you want that data showing up in reports. Discussing your organization’s needs early lets you see the right data in Flow faster.

Discuss with your teams their current use of git tags and any creation of new git tags that will be used for Flow. Make sure your teams agree on what constitutes a deployment so commits are tagged correctly. Then, when you configure your deployments in Flow, you already know which deployments your teams want insights into and how they're tagged.

For example, your team might have git tags for deployments to production and deployments to staging. If you only want to see data for production deployments, configure your deployments for your production deployment git tags, but not for your staging deployment git tags. If you want to see data for both, configure Flow for both. Your team may have deployments that should be tracked in Flow and others that should not. Deciding which git tags you want to use in Flow will make setup easier for everyone.

To set up your team for success, make sure your git tag naming conventions are meaningful and help you understand what changes they’re referring to. For most customers, this should be done with semantic versioning (external site, opens in new tab). While it’s possible to use other tagging strategies, using semantic versioning makes it easier to set up your git tagging filters in Flow and understand what changes they’re referring to.

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Permissions

You need the Manage Integrations permission at either View and manage or View, manage and delete levels to set git tags as your deployment source.

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What are git tags?

Git tags are reference points that indicate a specific event in the history of a repository. You can create a git tag to mark when a commit is deployed to production.

Learn more about Git tagging (external site, opens in new tab). Annotated tags give you the most information.

Applying git tags looks different in each vendor. Refer to your vendor’s documentation for the most detailed information. Here are a few examples:

• GitHub git tagging (external site, opens link in new tab)
• BitBucket repository tags (external site, opens link in new tab)
• GitLab tags (external site, opens in new tab)
• ADO git tagging (external site, opens link in new tab)

Lightweight vs annotated git tags

Your workflow may include using lightweight or annotated git tags. The tag type you choose impacts how Flow calculates your deployments. Specifically, it affects what date and time your deployment is associated with.

If you use lightweight tags:

• Flow uses the commit author date and time as the time of the deployment.

If you use annotated tags:

• The commit author date and time and the tag date and time may not have the same date and time.

• Flow uses the later of the two dates as the time of the deployment.

If your workflow involves tagging pre-existing commits after the fact, or applying tags in sequence to denote various actions, use annotated tags. This lets Flow capture the correct date and time of the deployment, based on how and when you tag in your workflow. If you don’t use annotated tags, commits may be associated with incorrect deployments due to the ordering of your lightweight tags.

If you use a combination of both annotated and lightweight tags, make sure to configure the regular expressions for your deployments in Flow to reference the correct tags based on how you want Flow to display deployments.

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Edit deployment source for integrations

Enable git tags as the deployment source at the integration level to track deployments for all repos in one or more integrations. Changes to your deployment source settings should take effect in Flow metrics within several hours and should not take longer than 24 hours.

Configure deployments for one or more integrations

To configure deployments, you must first turn on git tags as your deployment source.

To enable git tags as your deployment source for an integration:

1. Click Settings in the top navigation. 
2. In the left navigation, click Integrations.
3. Click the checkbox next to the integration you want to track deployments for. Click the checkboxes next to more than one integration if you want to track multiple integrations’ deployments.
4. Click Actions.
5. Click Edit deployment source.

   

6. In the pop-up modal, click Use git tags as deployment source.
7. Click Update.

Now Flow can track deployments in all repos within that integration.

Edit deployment source for all integrations

To configure deployments in all repos in all integrations:

1. In the top navigation, click Settings.
2. In the left navigation under Integrations, click Integrations.
3. Click Actions for all integrations at the top of the page.
4. Click Edit deployment source.
5. In the pop-up modal, click Use git tags as deployment source.
6. Click Update.

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Edit deployment source for repositories

Enable git tags as the deployment source at the repository level to specify specific respositories to track instead of tracking all repositories within an integration. This is valuable if only some of your teams use git tags as a source of deployments for their repos. Changes to your deployment source settings should take effect in Flow metrics within several hours, and should not take longer than 24 hours.

Edit deployment source for one or more repositories

To edit the deployment source for a specific repo:

1. Click Settings in the top navigation.
2. In the left navigation under Integrations, click Repos.
3. Use the checkboxes next to the repos to select the repositories to track deployments for.
4. Click the Actions dropdown menu.
5. Click Edit deployment source.

   

6. In the pop-up modal, click Use git tags as deployment source.
7. Click Update.

Edit deployment source for one repository

To turn on git tags as your deployment source for an individual repository:

1. Click Settings in the top navigation. 
2. In the left navigation under Integrations, click Repos.
3. Click the repository you want to track to view the repository details page.
4. Under Deployment source, toggle on Identify deployments for this repository.

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Set regular expression rules

Regular expression rules tell Flow which git tags indicate a deployment. If you use git tags for more than one purpose, you can filter for the specific git tags used to identify deployments. This is also useful if you only wish to track certain deployments that you differentiate by git tags. Create rules to identify which git tags are used to track deployments. Changes to your regular expression rules should take effect in Flow metrics within several hours, and should not take longer than 24 hours.

To create a regular expression rule

1. In the top navigation, click Settings.
2. In the left navigation under Integrations, click Repos.
3. Click the name of the repo you want to set regular expression rules for to see the repo details page.
4. Under Deployment Source, make sure Identify deployments for this repository is toggled on.
5. Under Deployments to include, click Create rule.
6. In the pop-up modal, type in the regular expression you want to use to locate your git tags.
7. Click Test Regex. This tests which tags use this rule and generates a list of git tags for this rule. Make sure this list matches the git tags you want Flow to track.
8. Click Save.

To create a regular expression rule for multiple repositories

1. In the top navigation, click Settings.

2. In the left navigation under Integrations, click Repos.

3. Use the filters at the top of the page to narrow down the list of repositories to the ones you want to add regular expression rules for. Click Apply filters. Filtering is helpful if you have a lot of repos but only want to set regular expression rules for a select few.

4. Click the checkbox to the left of all repos you want to edit. To select all repos on the page, click the checkbox to the left of the column headers.

5. Click the Actions dropdown menu.

6. Click Add deployment inclusion rule, then follow the steps above to add a regular expression rule.