Using Environments without creating deployment automatically

Current Situation: Every pipeline step that uses environments automatically creates a new deployment. This seems to be wanted behavior.

Problem Access to an environment might be also needed for other reasons than deployments. Like running integration tests (deployment already done; we want to assure correct behavior of latest deployment)

Possible Solution Can we add an option to avoid an automatic deployment always when using environment? An idea might be to set an environment variable like AUTO_DEPLOYMENT=false.

Additional information

• GitLab has option to specify what kind of action is done within environment

[yusijs]

This would be great, my pull requests currently look like this:

We use environments for builds etc as well (secrets), so it becomes a mess very quickly. Being able to specify the environment at the top level (before the jobs) might also help a bit, but ideally it would be possible to do something like this in the job definition:

environment:
  name: dev
  url: https://github.com
  deployment: false

[flobernd]

The exact same thing bugs me as well.

I would even go one step further and decouple the deployments from environments completely by default.

Imho every workflow should be able to be a deployment task - or not. Instead of using the environment to determine this, we could just have another string key in the yaml (similar to the “concurrency” key).