🚀 Feature: Gated Scaffolder Workflows

[taras]

🔖 Feature description

We need a way to created Scaffolder workflows that includes actions that may span days.

There are a bunch of use cases that need this, for example:

1. Wait for pull request to be merged - when a scaffolder workflow creates a pull request, we might want to wait for the pull request to be merged before continuing. Since merging pull requests requires human intervention, it may take days if not weeks for that action to complete.
2. Wait for another user to provide additional input - when creating workflows that require approval from someone within the organization, we might need to wait for the user to press a button before the workflow continues.
3. Wait for a resource to be created - when creating services, you might want to wait until a resource like a database is created before proceeding.

There is no way to do this currently.

🎤 Context

At the last Adoption SIG, I demoed using the Embedded Scaffolder Workflow to onboard an entity to use TechDocs by creating a pull request with everything necessary to onboard the entity. This demo is missing a few details that are required to create a complete user experience.

We need to handle the following states,

1. The workflow ran and created a pull request that needs to be merged. We need to show to the user that the PR is waiting.
2. After the PR is merged, but before the YAML document is ingested, we need to show to the user that onboarding is pending ingestion.

Handing these states consistently is best handled by the framework because there are many ways to mess this up. The Gated Scaffolder Workflows will make handling these use cases very easy.

✌️ Possible Implementation

We need to create an RFC to flash out how this will work.

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this feature request has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

🏢 Have you read the Code of Conduct?

• I have read the Code of Conduct

Are you willing to submit PR?

Yes I am willing to submit a PR!

[bforbis]

Curious how this might relate to the Prefect workflow in the Box demo during this community session?
https://youtu.be/apCDT3_DmFk?t=669

[stephenmuss]

Is there any movement on this at all? Such as an RFC. I'd be interested to see this.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[efenner-cambia]

Any movement on this? I would also like to see this and it looks like the other issue that was linked above got auto-closed

[taras]

We're about to ship a project using the Embedded Scaffolder plugin. I'm hoping we'll have the opportunity to work on this next because it'll help to provide status on previous executions of scaffolder.

[sharadpattanshetti]

We're about to ship a project using the Embedded Scaffolder plugin. I'm hoping we'll have the opportunity to work on this next because it'll help to provide status on previous executions of scaffolder.

Any example available on how this can be used in the templates?

[deeparavirdc]

+1 @taras Is there some documentation or example on how to enable this in backstage and use it with templates ?

[npalm]

Looking forward to gated support!

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[efenner-cambia]

@taras Any update?

[Alok650]

Following! This would be a very useful feature.

[benjdlambert]

Related #21299

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[knksmith57]

Bump to keep this alive 🙏

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[ghost]

Keep this alive!

[ghost]

@taras do you have any updates ?

[taras]

@fvmiranda Not really; the client that needed this has other priorities now. We have a few ideas on how to build it, but we need bandwidth to do it.