Writing plugins for Octopus

Following on from my previous post about writing plug-ins, here’s the next installment of what may or may not become an irregular feature.

I’ve been using Octopus Deploy at work for several years now, and it is a great tool for automating the deployment of software; in my case, it turned a 20-page manual checklist that took 40 minutes to work through into a five minute fire-and-forget exercise. However, there are still little steps here and there that can’t be automated out-of-the-box, and that’s where we pick up our story.

We track our work-in-progress using JIRA, and one of those tedious post-release tasks is to update all the tickets, setting their status to Released and so on. So, given that JIRA exposes an API, and Octopus supports custom steps or step templates written in Powershell, why not combine the two and cross another manual step off the list?!

Show me the code!

Actually, I’m not going to post any code snippets this time – rather, I’ve published the source code to GitHub (something else I’m learning, after 15 years of Subversion), so go ahead and fork it. There’s not a whole lot of error handling in there at the moment, but it seems to do the trick. There are two files:

• the original Powershell file, which you can open up and run in the Powershell IDE;
• the Octopus Deploy step template, which wraps up the Powershell in a bit and parameterises it to make the code more reusable