Request: Add versioning to templates/pipelines

[arakakimarcelo]

Idea

As a person in a team that uses concourse in a large environment, it would be great to implement some sort of versioning into the pipelines.

Whenever I change a single template, it is mandatory to update every single pipeline using such template and this is a pain.
I can't really know what pipeline versions are running right now, and I think this would be a very nice feature. Or is it intended to always run latest version?

Would I build it?

I'm open for discussions and would like to contribuite if given some directions.

[marco-m]

This might or not be an answer: it might be possible to exploit the fact that fly set-pipeline is idempotent.
That is, each time you change a template, you could run fly set-pipeline on all the pipelines that have been created with that template, without the need to know the version.
In both cases (if Concourse supported versioned pipelines or not), you would still need, OOB of Concourse, at least a list of all pipelines spawned by a given template...
Or am I missing something ?

[taylorsilva]

Would love to know more about how pipelines are currently being set in your large environment.

You say

Whenever I change a single template, it is mandatory to update every single pipeline using such template and this is a pain.

Can you explain why this is a pain? How are the pipelines set? Do you use set_pipeline?

[arakakimarcelo]

We do use set_pipeline, but the thing is.. i'm pretty sure not every pipeline is using the latest version of every template we have.
Versioning gives me a preview of how many "bumps" such pipeline needs to perform.

[taylorsilva]

This feature coming in the next release might be useful: #9489

You can embed a version number inside the user_data field and then you can do fly get-pipeline if you suspect a pipeline hasn't been updated.