Deployment events

With deployment events, you can trigger a parallel run of all active plans that meet specified conditions, including application, environment, and plan label. This type of test execution is ideal for integrating automated end-to-end testing into your team’s CI/CD workflow. Benefits include:

• Faster feedback cycle - plans run in parallel, so you can get results faster
• Robust validation - since plans run in the mabl cloud, the output includes detailed run artifacts.

This article explains how to set up, run, and review mabl deployment events.

Set up plans for deployment events

Deployment events trigger tests at the plan level. A plan must meet the following criteria to run in a deployment event:

• The plan configuration aligns with the deployment event’s parameters for application and/or environment, plus plan labels if added.
• The plan is active.
• The plan is configured to accept a deployment trigger, which is configured in the Triggers section of the plan settings page.
• At least one of the tests in the plan is turned on.

Define tests suites with plan labels

At a minimum, deployment events require that you specify an application or environment. For example, triggering a deployment event in the “dev” environment runs all active plans associated with that environment.

With plan labels, you can define specific test suites, such as “regression”, “targeted regression”, “smoke”, or a certain functionality or feature area. For example, triggering a deployment event for the “dev” environment with a “smoke” label ensures that only active “dev” plans that also have a “smoke” label run.

Trigger a deployment event

There are several ways to trigger a deployment event:

• CI/CD integration
• mabl API
• mabl CLI
• mabl app

The underlying concepts and parameters of mabl deployment events are the same across all methods. For the sake of simplicity, this article explains how to manually trigger a deployment event from the mabl app.

Depending on the arguments that you provide, deployment events are capable of triggering a lot of plan runs that will count toward your quota of allotted credits. To prevent excessive credit usage while testing out deployment events for the first time, we recommend adding a “deployment-demo” label to a specific plan or set of plans that you want to run:

1. On the mabl home page, click on the New button in the top-right corner.
2. Select deployment to open the new deployment page.
3. Select the environment, the application, or both environment and application from the dropdowns
4. To target specific plans, choose one or more plan labels. For example, if you added a “deployment-demo” label to plans, don’t forget to include it in your deployment event configuration!
5. Optionally, you may configure additional settings, including:
   • URL override - useful for running plans against a dynamically created preview environment
   • Browser override - override browser settings configured at the plan level
   • Revision - associate the deployment event with a specific code revision hash
6. Click the Trigger Deploy button to create the deployment event.

The app will redirect to the deployment event output page, where you can monitor its status and review results.

Previewing the deployment event

If you are unsure how many plans will run in a deployment event, you can follow these steps to preview how many plans will run before triggering an actual deployment event:

1. Go the to API page: Settings > API
2. In the API documentation section, select “Create deployment event”
3. Select your target environment and/or application.
4. Add optional settings as needed, including plan labels, URL overrides, and credentials.
5. Copy the generated curl command.
6. Open a terminal window on your machine.
7. Paste the curl command into the terminal.
8. Replace the URL with https://api.mabl.com/events/deployment?preview=true
9. Press enter to see the preview.

The “triggered_plan_run_summaries” section in the JSON response shows the plans that would run if you triggered this deployment event. Consider the following response:

{
  "id":"RAV64K2nQJ0GslNVfmtPuQ-v",
  "environment_id":"Ojc0fnJOoTBgSEZSHUCrhQ-e",
  "workspace_id":"RS2yqNMP9nK9qobpJiZ74Q-w",
  "received_time":1658414608812,
  "triggered_plan_run_summaries":[
    {"plan_id":"cLhFR8Fz0Kpsh70zP6EQ3Q-p"},
    {"plan_id":"GASWQXKMiGBXOReVCms2HQ-p"},
    {"plan_id":"AiqbHQaNT0O47lWAYDYWSA-p"},
    {"plan_id":"oqE3sw3QxQhniftVBm7NXw-p"},
    {"plan_id":"RBaecKUQHHAKkfXjTt1g3g-p"},
    {"plan_id":"XH7ww6JQM8zy8bZGLB7Z1g-p"},
    {"plan_id":"w3YwxgVepvEBjWnRkzl10g-p"}
  ]
}

This sample response lists seven plan IDs, which means that seven plans would run as a result of this deployment event.

Review results

All deployment events triggered from your workspace may be reviewed from the deployment results page: Results > By deployment. Click on the deployment event time to view output for a specific execution.

Get results by deployment ID

You can also retrieve deployment event results using its unique deployment ID, which ends in -v. For example: RAV64K2nQJ0GslNVfmtPuQ-v.

• mabl CLI: Run mabl deployments describe {deployment-id}
• mabl API: use the get deployment result summary endpoint.

Learn more

Understanding deployment events is a crucial step toward achieving coverage at scale. To take your knowledge a step further, consider checking out the following guides on implementing deployment events into your testing workflow:

• Continuous testing in CI/CD
• API-based CI/CD integrations
• Deployment Events API documentation