Confused about Deployment Strategy

[Mkublbock]

We are currently researching the deployment strategy for AL-Go but are a bit confused as to how it works in real life.
We have read this blog post from Freddy: https://freddysblog.com/2022/05/06/deployment-strategies-and-al-go-for-github/

Our process is as follows:

1. Develop new Features
2. QA Testing
3. FAT Testing
4. PROD Release

Very basic and what most partners probably follow. Freddy describes the process in AL-Go as follows:

1. Push Features into main -> these will automatically be published into QA
2. If QA approves the changes -> publish to FAT environment
3. If Customer approves -> publish to PROD

This is where we are confused. Because after we publish to the FAT environment we obviously continue developing new features that are pushed into main

Freddys next step is to create a release of the latest build version from main, but if we developed new features in the meantime that means we are now publishing features that have never been tested in FAT.

So, the process actually looks like

1. Develop new Features
2. QA Testing | Develop new Features
3. FAT Testing | Develop new Features
4. PROD Release

So, our understanding would be

1. Develop new Features in main
2. QA Testing
3. Create a prerelease (for example version 26.0.0) and publish to FAT
4. FAT Testing
   5 Create Release from prerelease (26.0.0) and publish to PROD

First of all, I want to know if this process is correct or if we are simply misunderstanding something?

Secondly, we wanted to try our workflow with creating a prerelease but we are not really sure what version to use in the release. For example for the prerelease we defined the version to be 26.0.0

but then for the actual production release we want to release the same version which doesn't work because the tag already exists. Also, the release action says that it cannot find any artifacts. We tried running the action from main branch with build version prerelease and running it from prerelease branch with version latest. None of them worked.

[mazhelez]

Hi @Mkublbock

Thanks for sharing your experience when working will AL-Go for GitHub. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

First of all, I want to know if this process is correct or if we are simply misunderstanding something?

Correct. This is indeed the assumed process.

"Create release" action utilizes GitHub releases. Once you have a pre-release, you don't need to create a new release, you can change the pre-release manually to a release by unsetting the "Set as a pre-release" check.

[Mkublbock]

Thank you, that helps a lot!