Add information to merge request widget about why the review app disappeared
Summary
Review apps for the gitlab-org/gitlab
project are being used by product designers internally to review MR environments. This is sometimes easier than using GitPod or GDK, as long as the feature can be reviewed without much manipulation to code.
The review app widget is not always visible to the user on these MRs, and it is not clear why. This makes it extremely difficult to figure out how to review using a review app. The cases we are sure that this happens in are:
- The project review apps are being stopped 48 hours after the last deployment. Impact -
This however is not visible to the user and when this happened to me, I had no idea why the review app that was there yesterday was not visible anymore.
- This one is more unknown, the
review-deploy
job passes and should show the review app, but the widget does not appear until you trigger thereview-deploy
job again.Is there something missing to trigger the review app? It looks like its passed but is not showing the button to launch the environment. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/109031
(Related slack convo)
Proposal
In any case where the review app is not currently deployed:
- Add text to explain that the review app was stopped.
- Add a
Re-deploy
button. This button should trigger the job to deploy the review app. (The current workaround for this is to locate that job in the pipeline and run it, which can be time-consuming and difficult to do, or even outright impossible if the user doesn't know what job triggers it) - Designs in design management
- Figma
Technical proposal
- Add a feature flag
- When the feature flag is enabled, return all environments instead of just
available
ones, inenvironment_status.rb
:
- pipeline.environments_in_self_and_project_descendants.includes(:project).available.map do |environment|
+ pipeline.environments_in_self_and_project_descendants.includes(:project).map do |environment|
- Handle any new statuses that this exposes in the
<deployment />
component
/cc @meks As you mentioned the idea to give users a way to spin the environment back up in Slack.
Edited by Miranda Fluharty