Skip to main content

How-to: Add a direct link to the Parent build from a Child build

  • Updated

Overview

The Parent-Child approach is a common pattern when defining your CI/CD processes. It's possible to implement that model in Codefresh when using the codefresh-run plugin (link).

Given the popularity of this pattern, it's also common having to navigate from the Parent-build to its Child-build. This functionality is natively provided by the platform.

But, currently, it's not possible to easily navigate from the Child-build to its parent.

In this article we'll provide a solution for that scenario.

Details

Every build that is executed by a call to a codefresh-run plugin is enriched with a special annotation that precisely identifies its parent.

The name of this annotation is cf_predecessor. We can query the value of this annotation in the Child-build, and using that information we can know its parent. Specifically, it's possible to get the ID of the Parent-build.

With that information, it's also possible to build a link to the Parent-build by constructing the corresponding build-URL.

Implementation

Since all the information can be inferred from the Child-build itself, there's nothing to add or modify in the Parent-build.

You'll need to simply add this step to the Child-build. For example, at the beginning of the pipeline:

steps:
  ...
  linkToParentBuild:
    image: codefresh/cli
    commands:
      - export parentBuildId=$(codefresh get annotation build ${{CF_BUILD_ID}} cf_predecessor -o json | jq -r '.value')
      - cf_export linkToParentBuild_CF_OUTPUT_URL="${{CF_URL}}/build/${parentBuildId}"
  ...

Link to Parent-build

Note:

For the in-step-link to work, the name of the cf_exported variable must follow this pattern: <name|key_of_step>_CF_OUTPUT_URL, and its value should be the URL to link to.

Related Items

Related articles