Scheduled CICD Runs for Specific Branches

[AlexanderMarcher]

Feature description

As discussed during the office hour meeting, I would love a workflow that allows developers to schedule a CICD run for a specific branch at a specified time.

For example, if a customer requests a deployment at 8 PM, the developer could schedule it in advance during working hours, ensuring it executes automatically at the set time.

The CICD process should run only once at the scheduled time and should not repeat unless manually scheduled again.

This feature would increase flexibility, enable more controlled deployments, and reduce manual intervention

[freddydk]

This is related to this discussion: #995 - and we might be able to re-use the way this is setup for Update AL-Go system files - but it will require some coding.

[mazhelez]

@AlexanderMarcher This seems like something GitHub could support in general.

If AL-Go for GitHub is to support such functionality, how would you expect to set it up?

[mazhelez]

Something similar would be my approach as well.

The major downside, though, is the wasted compute time while sleeping.

[AlexanderMarcher]

Something similar would be my approach as well.

The major downside, though, is the wasted compute time while sleeping.

Yes, that is a concern. I also conducted a longer test yesterday and discovered that GitHub runners have a maximum execution time of 360 minutes

[freddydk]

I would probably suggest a more generic approach, where you could schedule a workflow run by adding a github variable to the repository. That variable would contain the time, the repository/repositories, the workflow and the inputs.
Then you would have a generic workflow running hourly or like, which would check whether any workflow run is due.
The time for the generic workflow to complete if no scheduled variable is added is probably a few seconds

[AlexanderMarcher]

I would probably suggest a more generic approach, where you could schedule a workflow run by adding a github variable to the repository. That variable would contain the time, the repository/repositories, the workflow and the inputs. Then you would have a generic workflow running hourly or like, which would check whether any workflow run is due. The time for the generic workflow to complete if no scheduled variable is added is probably a few seconds

I like this approach for handling long execution times, but hourly checks can be imprecise and may cause delays—like if a customer wants deployments during their lunch break. Also, managing scheduling through repository variables instead of the Actions UI also adds unnecessary friction.

[nickgoddard777]

In Azure DevOps there is a setting called business hours. This is used to schedule deployments to specific environments outside of these hours.
Could this work in a similar way whereby a flag is set on an environment and whenever Publish to Environment is run and that environment is selected then a scheduled action is created/enabled with the choices from the original action saved to it.

[AlexanderMarcher]

@mazhelez
I’ve built a workflow that accomplishes this - it’s been working well in our setup, though I don’t think it could be implemented in AL-Go in its current form.

The basic flow is:

It takes the input datetime, converts it to UTC, and then translates that into a cron schedule.

Based on that, it generates a new workflow file via pull request and merge.

That new workflow then dispatches the CICD pipeline at the scheduled time, and finally opens a pull request to delete itself once it’s done.

Kind of a hacky little automation loop, but it gets the job done reliably.

[mazhelez]

Quite hacky indeed.

My suggestion is to disable the workflow instead of deleting it.

It's quite a corner case. If you feel like it could be useful for other AL-Go users, create an idea at https://github.com/microsoft/AL-Go/discussions/new?category=ideas and let others vote for it.

[mazhelez]

Haha, just realized this is already in the ideas section 😄
Ok, let's leave it here for now.