Adding an approval step

Add manual approvals to your Relay workflow when you need more control over when something is deployed. For example, you could prevent a deployment to your production environment without an approval from your engineering lead.

After you add an approval to your workflow, an approver can accept or reject it from the workflow run page in the Relay web interface. To respond to an approval request, you must have Approver or Administrator level of access.

Approvals are similar to regular steps, although they do not require an image key. Approvals consist of the following keys:

• name: A string. The name of your approval.

• description: A string. A description of your approval.

• type: A string. Use approval to define the step as an approval.

• dependsOn: A string, or an array of strings. (Optional) The steps that need to complete successfully before Relay requests the approval.

An approval that does not list a dependency under dependsOn can be approved or rejected at any time. An approval that does list dependencies can only be approved once those dependencies have successfully completed.

A step that immediately follows your approval should list the approval step as a dependency using dependsOn. Multiple steps can depend on a single approval.

An example of an approval with a deploy-prod step that depends on it:

steps:
  - name: prod-approval
    description: Deploying to production requires approval
    type: approval
  - name: deploy-prod
    image: relaysh/terraform-step-terraform:latest
    spec:
      vars:
        gcp_region: us-east1
        gcp_location: us-east1-b
        gcp_project: app-prod
      workspace: app
      directory: provision-gke/infra/
      credentials:
        credentials.json: !Secret credentials
      git:
        name: app
        repository: https://github.com/apptime/app
    dependsOn:
    - prod-approval

In this workflow, an approver can only take action on the prod-approval step after the provision-k8s step has completed. After the approver accepts prod-approval, Relay executes deploy-prod, which depends on prod-approval.

Only users with the Approver or Administrator roles can approve an approval step. You can assign roles to users from Access control in the Relay web interface. If an approver rejects an approval step, or the approval's timer expires, the workflow run fails. Approval steps currently expire after an hour.