DEVOPSdigest

Octopus Deploy announced the availability of GitHub Actions for Octopus Deploy v2.

The new updates to the company's integrations further support its deployment automation for GitHub Actions workflows.

"GitHub Actions is a powerful tool that automates software development workflows, like CI/CD," said Paul Stovell, Founder and CEO of Octopus. "We are evolving the deployment capabilities of GitHub by providing actions that integrate directly with Octopus Deploy. Octopus Deploy is the 'peanut butter' to GitHub Actions' 'jelly'; it uses GitHub Actions for building and testing code and uses Octopus Deploy for deployments. With our integration in GitHub Actions, customers may achieve reliable, repeatable, traceable deployments across clouds and on-premises infrastructures."

Key updates to GitHub Actions for Octopus Deploy include:

- Incorporate build information into deployment pipelines: GitHub has introduced a new push-build-information-action, which lets users provide detailed commit, build, and issue tracking information to Octopus. These are used with deployments to produce release notes for stakeholders and for each production deployment. These allow users to follow links from deployments back to builds and commits when trying to isolate bugs introduced in specific releases. This action also synchronizes DevOps Insights in Octopus, giving users better visibility into their company's DevOps performance by surfacing DORA metrics.

- Semantic Versioning (SemVer) release tag support: Users can reference release tags in workflows more easily than before. Any changes made to actions will automatically update release tags and will be incorporated into workflows.

- Improved usability: GitHub Actions for Octopus Deploy are now easier to use for deployment automations from GitHub. It has reduced the number of required parameters and added detailed output to the execution logs. It also added support for environment variables for sensitive values.

- Job summaries: Actions output was previously limited to logs and annotations, which were difficult to aggregate and group. With GitHub Actions for Octopus Deploy v2, users can now see job summaries generated through GitHub-flavored Markdown when creating a release or pushing a package to Octopus, making these actions easier to aggregate and group.