pipelines: Supporting a feature branch development process

[justinwiley]

Describe the feature

Multi-branch feature development and pipelines is a common development practice. However, this functionality isn't built into CDK Pipeline natively. A blog post about a potential solution published last year describes a possible workaround, with a few serious barriers to adoption:

1. It's incompatible with Github connections, which do not trigger event bridge notifications
2. It's requires deploying a variety of custom resources for each branch, including 2 lambda functions that need to be access controlled, updated and maintained.

Given CDK Pipeline is intended to enable "painless continuous delivery of AWS CDK applications", it seems like supporting more than the most basic deployment process should be part of it's scope.

Use Case

Supporting a feature branch development process, without lot's of additional setup.

Proposed Solution

Update the branch parameter aws-cdk-lib/pipelines/lib/codepipeline/codepipeline-source to allow the branch parameter to be either a string or a regular expression. If it's a regular expression, only trigger the pipeline if the branch matches the pattern.

The ergonomics on a code pipeline might look like:

new CodePipeline(this, 'FeaturePipeline', {
  pipelineName: 'FeaturePipeline',
  synth: new CodeBuildStep('Synth', {
    input: CodePipelineSource.connection(
      'some-repo',
      /feat\-/, // branch pattern, 
      {
        connectionArn: `arn:aws:codestar-connections:region:acccount:connection/some connection`
      }
    ),
    commands: [
      // ....
    ]
  })
})

Other Information

No response

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

CDK version used

2.83.1

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

Mac OS latest

[pahud]

Thank you for your feature request. I just renamed the issue title but I am not sure if it's appropriate. I am making this a p2 feat request and we welcome upvotes and further ideas and pull requests for this.

[KevinToala]

This would be great to implement with AWS CDK. Maybe now with aws codepipeline v2 it can be done?