Approval settings
Self-approval and reviewer forwarding for your organization, a gate or one deployment environment, and which one applies.
Availability
Two approval settings decide how Prodgator counts and forwards approvals:
| Setting | What it does | Product default |
|---|---|---|
| Self-approval | Lets the person who triggered a release count as one of its approvers. A release policy rule must also allow self-approval (see When an approval does not count). | Off |
| Reviewer forwarding | A Prodgator approval also approves as the approver on GitHub (their linked account), for environments with required reviewers. | On |
Where to set them
You can set each one at three levels:
- Organization: Settings > Approvals. These are your organization's defaults.
- Gate: the gate's page, under approval settings. Inherit uses the organization's value.
- Deployment environment: its Configure action on the Gates page. Inherit uses the organization's value.
Until an admin saves the organization's defaults, the product defaults in the table above apply. Saving them changes nothing for gates and deployment environments that set their own value.
Which value applies
For each deployment environment, Prodgator looks for a value in this order:
- The deployment environment's own settings and the settings of every gate it belongs to. When more than one of these sets a value, the stricter one wins: self-approval is on only if one turns it on and none turns it off, and reviewer forwarding is off if any turns it off.
- The organization's defaults, when nothing above sets a value.
- The product default, when your organization has not saved its own defaults.
The Explain action on a deployment environment shows each setting's value and where it came from: a gate, the deployment environment itself, the organization default or the product default.
When an approval does not count
When self-approval is off, the deployment card, the policy details and the message after you approve say which level turned it off and link to it. For example: "Does not count: Nate Ferrell triggered this deployment, and self-approval is off in your organization's approval settings." When no level set it, the message says "self-approval is off by default" and links to Settings > Approvals, where an admin can turn it on for the organization.
Admin overrides of release policies are a separate organization setting (see Admin override).
Set up a gate
Order gates, include deployment environments by pattern, and keep membership right when repositories are renamed.
Approve deployments
The two kinds of gate on a GitHub environment, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps approvals, approving and rejecting from Prodgator one at a time or in bulk, and what Prodgator posts to the provider.