Understanding my deployment scenario: workspaces

[SeanKilleen]

Hi all,

Brand new to Atlantis but love the idea. I'm trying to understand how Atlantis would fit into my current workflow.

I currently have all Terraform shared amongst each environment, which I separate via workspaces.

So the typical flow to deploy a change might be:

• Update TF
• Switch to the dev workspace
• Run TF apply with dev variables
• Switch to test workspace
• Run TF apply with test variables
• etc. etc.

My main question is: in our team's provided flow, using Atlantis, how would I promote changes between environments? Is the idea that pull requests that change things are automatically applied to say, dev when merged, and then somehow promoted to the next environment via another mechanism?

This seems like a fantastic tool to adopt but I just want to make sure I conceptually understand it for our scenario first.

[SeanKilleen]

Ah, I think I was very close to the right spot in the docs when I asked this 😅

I think the solution in this case would be to run e.g atlantis apply -w test after the PR is merged, in a comment on the PR's thread? So:

• Make change in PR
• Merge change, have it apply to dev (do I have to run atlantis apply here? Or can it happen automatically?)
• Run atlantis apply -w test in the merged PR's comments

If someone can confirm whether I'm correct, I'd appreciate it!

[jamengual]

yes that should work.
Automatic apply is not possible so you need to run the apply command.
you will need an custom workflow in your atlantis.yaml and define your projects and workspaces for each.
Atlantis work on merges so once the PR to dev is merged then you can create another PR to apply to test, stage, prod etc.
You can get creative with some post_workflow_hooks and create a script to create an automated PR for you etc.

[SeanKilleen]

@jamengual thank you for the detailed response!

That makes sense to me except for one thing: how would I create a PR to merge to test if I have no changes? In my situation, once I merge a change, it can be deployed to all environments by running TF apply.

Would I essentially create PR with an empty / blank commit?

[jamengual]

yes, or maybe have a release file or something like that.
Atlantis works against PRs only.
I believe you can create a PR with no changes in github

[SeanKilleen]

Atlantis works against PRs only.

That's the key piece that I wasn't sure of. Thank you!