Using Different Branches

CodePipeline currently does not supports starting the pipeline execution with different branches natively. To get around this, we can:

1. update the pipeline before starting it.
2. create additional pipelines.

Pipe Dream supports both methods.

Update Pipeline Approach

With the update pipeline approach, the pipeline gets updated if the current pipeline branch is different from the requested branch before a pipeline execution starts. Examples:

pipe start -b master
pipe start -b qa

Note: With this approach, since the pipeline gets updated, the pipeline will maintain the last branch it was started with.

Multiple Pipelines Approach

You might normally set the branch option in your pipeline.rb. Example:

stage "Source" do
  github(
    source: "user/repo",
    branch: "master",
    auth_token: ssm("/github/user/token")
  )
end

When we deploy to create the pipelines, we can explicitly specify the branch to use. The cli option overrides the branch specified in pipeline.rb. Examples:

pipe deploy demo-master -b master
pipe deploy demo-qa -b qa

This creates 2 pipelines. The demo-master pipeline will use the master branch, and the demo-qa pipeline will use the qa branch.

To start the pipelines:

pipe start demo-master
pipe start demo-qa

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