Create a pipeline and release flow

Pipelines on Northflank allow you to create and manage complex workflows, deploying your code in different stages for development, staging, and production.

Combined with release flows, pipelines offer an incredible amount of flexibility to support your development process and manage releases.

Pipelines are specific to projects, and you can only include resources such as deployment services, jobs, and addons from the project that contains your pipeline. Likewise, you will only be able to deploy builds created in the same project as your pipeline.

Each pipeline consists of three stages, development, staging, and production, and you can use these in any way you require to suit your workflow. You can create a release flow for each pipeline stage to manage your release, including promoting builds, backing up databases, and running migrations.

To create a new pipeline either select create new from the pipelines page, or pipeline from the create new menu.

Enter a name to identify the pipeline and click create.

You can add services, jobs, and addons to each stage of your pipeline in whatever configuration best represents your workflow. These resources can then be used in the release flows for each stage of your pipeline to automate your release management.

Add resources

Click the button at the bottom of a stage to view the resources available to add to your pipeline.

Resources that belong to another pipeline cannot be added, and you can filter resources by name using the search function.

Select all the resources you want to add to the stage of the pipeline, and click add.

To move a resource to another stage, remove it from its current stage and add it to the stage you want it to be in.

Remove resources

You can remove a resource from a pipeline by clicking the remove button on the service, addon, or job you want to remove.

This will also remove any nodes related to this resource in your release flows, please make sure you carefully review the effect this will have on your release flows, if any.

You can view and delete pipelines from the pipelines page. If you delete a pipeline, it will remove your configured pipeline overview and any release flows it contains. Deleting a pipeline will not affect any of your services, all the deployments, job, and addons added to the pipeline will continue to run as individually configured.

You can create a release flow for a stage of your pipeline by clicking add release flow in the release header for the specific stage.

You can create a release flow by using the visual editor to drag and drop nodes, clicking into a node to edit its configuration. You can also create a release flow as code, if you are more familiar with templates and the Northflank API.

See configure a release flow to learn more about configuring release flows and release flow nodes.

You can manage a release flow by clicking the options button for the relevant release flow.

From here you can view release flow runs to see when the release flow was last run, any rollbacks, and the status of the release. You can click into individual releases or rollbacks to view the result of each node, and to roll back to the selected release.

You can edit release flow to add, remove, or reconfigure existing nodes using either the visual or code editor.