Manual Runs

Infrastructure as Code is great, but definitely will occasionally flake. Anything from drift in infrastructure or a terraform lock going awry can cause annoying breakages. Manual runs are meant to solve for this. There are two main modes of a manual run:

• One-off script supplied by the user in-UI
• Pre-configured runs for common repair workflows, like running terraform force-unlock {lock-id} which can enhance self-serviceability of the process

Launching a Manual Run

To launch a manual run, simply click the Create manual run button in the stacks UI

This will provide a simple wizard which can guide you through the workflow. This will trigger a run with the expected commands, within the same environment as a standard stack run.

Create a Custom Run

You can create a pre-baked manual run via the CustomRun CRD, like so:

apiVersion: deployments.plural.sh/v1alpha1
kind: CustomStackRun
metadata:
  name: force-unlock
spec:
  name: force-unlock
  documentation: "force release a terraform lock if present"
  commands:
  - cmd: terraform
    args: [init]
  - cmd: terraform
    args:
    - force-unlock
    - '-force'
    - "{{ context.lockId }}"
  configuration:
  - name: lockId
    type: STRING
    documentation: the lock id to release

This creates a wizard-based manual run for the terraform force-unlock command, which can save your engineers a tedious look through the docs. It's also incredibly useful if you have customized your runner with additional scripts that might be used for ad-hoc operations.