Allow to deploy 'draft' PRs to some environments

[szymonpk]

Details

I am wondering. Would it be a good idea to have a list of environments that we can deploy to even if PR is in a draft state?

In "my" organization, people can deploy to some stages before the review. Marking PR as "ready" triggers review requests, and it may be unwanted in most cases.

[GrantBirki]

👋 Great question @szymonpk! I'll weigh in my own thoughts / opinions here.

Professionally and in personal projects, I have never deployed a pull request that was in a draft state. This is because the mentality that I (personally) take with draft PRs is that they are not yet ready to ship. They are a "work in progress" and only become ready to deploy when it is moved out of the draft state.

That being said, there are a lot of ways to embark in the journey on software development and different ways for folks to use GitHub to accomplish what they need to do. One of the core concepts of the branch-deploy Action is indeed flexibility.

I personally would suggest to steer away from making draft PRs deploy-able a habit. However, perhaps there is a really valid reason for your team to do things this way, so we should have the configurations of this Action block you from shipping your code.

I will take a look at the code in this project and see what adjustments, and input options need to be added to enable your team to do this.

Thanks!

[szymonpk]

We treat some environments very 'lightly' ;-) In our case, deployment may be the easiest way to present current work (in progress) to a wider audience. Sometimes we work on rather complex data sets.

Also, if this action gets approval in our org, we probably would like to use it for 'dynamic environments' at some point (created per PR). In such case, a draft-blocker would be an issue :(

As for the implementation (I am not proficient in any form of JS), I was thinking it could be done like environment_targets. We could pass a list draft_permitted_targets: "foo,bar" and modify isDraft logic. Check if environment is on the allow list.

[GrantBirki]

@szymonpk I'll try and accomplish this soon for ya!