[FEATURE] failure: ignore for pipelines

Drone Support
1

Is it possible for the failure: ignore to apply to a whole pipeline? We have a case where we have a pipeline that deploys to a sandbox environment and we want this pipeline to not fail the build, but still show failures if the deployments failed. We want this in a pipeline level because we have 1 pipeline per env for this specific case. Why? Because otherwise we’ll have a pipeline with like 500+ steps…. :grimacing:.

So anyways the goal is to have the individual steps in this pipeline as green/red as normal, then the pipeline is red, but the build overall is a success if the rest of the pipelines are green. Is this possible? Could this functionality be reasonably added to Drone?

example

Example .drone.yml:

---
kind: pipeline
type: docker
name: test failures
trigger:
  event: push
steps:
- name: test failure 1
  failure: ignore
  image: alpine
  commands:
    - exit 1
- name: test failure 2
  failure: ignore
  image: alpine
  commands:
    - exit 1
- name: test success 1
  image: alpine
  commands:
    - exit 0
2 Likes
2

So if I understand this properly, you have multiple pipelines running multiple steps, and may have issues with a build step in the mentioned pipeline? You might be able to get away with using:

this is essentially a step on probably your master pipeline which could have the failure: ignore statement added to it and thus become a sub-pipeline in the main that would not care if it failed. Does that answer your question?

3

It’s not a single step that needs to be ignored but rather the whole pipeline regardless of which step may succeed/fail.

Imagine a scenario where we have a 3 identical deployment pipelines, one for our production environment, one for our staging environment, and one for our sandbox environment. Each pipeline has 4 steps–one step for each of the services we deploy. (Note that this is a semi-contrived example to illustrate the point and not that we are actually deploying code in this manner.)

Now, we want the pipelines for stage and prod to always succeed and its important that they return success/failure as expected, but for the sandbox pipeline we just don’t care. We still want all the steps within the sandbox deployment pipeline to succeed/fail on their own, but overall we don’t care about the sum total success/failure of the pipeline. We would like to be able to set failure: ignore at the pipeline level.

Example:

kind: pipeline
type: docker
name: example
trigger:
  event: push
ignore: failure # <-- we want this
steps: [ ... ]
4

@hikerspath Any thoughts on this?

5

Yikes! Well, obviously I TOTALLY got your last message :-\ Sorry for not responding. I get what you are asking for but am pretty sure it doesn’t work at the entire pipeline level because the pipeline itself will have to fail or pass and record its status in build history… otherwise it doesn’t have one?

What I was suggesting, is that you can tier your pipelines using the downstream build which would make a pipeline execution a step in another pipeline. This step could easily be set to ignore. Another option (since it looks like you are building environments) might be to look into using deployments (promote from the cli) to build these however you wish, then your ‘sandbox’ could show a separate status from production for example.

6

No worries, and Happy New Year!

This (Downstream Build | Drone) is an interesting idea where we would trigger a downstream pipeline in the same repo? It feels like a bit of a workaround, but I see how it could be done. Thanks!

On the original feature request I had spoken with @bradrydzewski earlier in 2020 in the Drone slack about this feature and he seemed interested in the idea, although he did mention it would require some changes to the DB (likely some column changes). Do you have any more thoughts on this Brad?