Approval of Change Requests
A change request can be approved manually or automatically (provided all required compliance checks are passing and deployment readiness is true
).
By default, standard change requests are created and if all of the required compliance checks pass, the deployment readiness is set to true
. When a change request is of the standard type and the deployment readiness is set to true
,
it is automatically approved.
If one or more compliance checks fail, deployment readiness is set to false
, the continuous deployment pipeline breaks, and the deployment stops because of the unapproved change request.
You can still proceed with deployment in case of an emergency by adding an emergency label to the promotion pull request.
You can also provide a manually pre-approved change request that the deployment pipeline can utilise (with label status_approved
) In Gitlab
Take either of the following approaches:
Option 1: Adding an emergency label to promotion PR
If you need to deploy emergency changes immediately, you can use emergency mode. When you promote a change, add an emergency
label to the promotion pull request to prompt the continuous deployment pipeline to create an emergency
change request. Emergency change requests allow deployment to continue even if the approval is missing. For more information on the emergency flow, see Automating change management.
Use the emergency mode sparingly and with caution.
You can set the value of the emergency label (default: EMERGENCY
) that the continuous deployment pipeline looks for on the promotion pull request when you create the toolchain.

You can also change the value of the emergency label from the pipeline's environment variables:

When the deployment completes, the emergency change request is set to the Review
state, which indicates that it requires the assigned approvers to review and approve it retroactively.
Option 2: Providing a manually pre-approved CR
If the deployment is not an emergency, you can wait for the change request to be manually approved. Use the existing, manually pre-approved change request number that is set in the continuous deployment pipeline environment variables. The default
value is notAvailable
, which means the continuous deployment pipeline creates a new change request.
