Add external environments and deployments to GitLab
Problem to Solve
When someone is using environments & deployments feature in GitLab, it is possible to see in a merge request widget when a merge request was deployed to production. But, when you are not using GitLab to deploy, then it is not possible to see this in a merge request widget because there is no way for an external deployment tool to provide the information.
Use Case
It'd give us the ability to link a particular GitLab commit or merge request to any Heroku app it was deployed to. In their particular case, they'd need to be able to tell GitLab:
- The sha in question
- The name of the app that was deployed to
- The depoyed web url
- The status of the deploy ("pending", "successful", "errored")
..and have that show up and linked when viewing a commit or merge request.
This is being requested specifically for Heroku, but you could imagine any deployment engine providing this information.
Proposal
We will make it possible to use environments & deployments feature even when someone is not using GitLab to deploy their software. In order to ship this feature we can generalize the action that created a deployment. We can either create a simplified entity that describes a deployment action or just allow creating deployments without specifying the action that triggered it. The deployment itself stores following data: internal id, environment that deployment has been created for, Git branch / SHA, when a deployment has been created and by whom.
The most simple change is removing the need of having CI/CD job associated with a deployment.