Octopus Deploy: Update Variables Without Creating New Release

That might be a new feature or not, maybe I'm just getting surprised by Octopus Deploy over and over again. In all projects I worked on so far, I always created a new release for any changes to variables. This might change.

Yesterday I had an awful phone call meeting with a smart-arse, but hey! we've got to see the silver lining in everything, right? I did learn something from him, so the meeting was not a completely waste of my time.

Apparently, we can update the variables in an existing release, so no need to create a new release. And that's how you do it:

I do love this feature, but to be very honest, I think that can be quite dangerous as well. It's quite easy to break a deployment because of variables.

Imagine this scenario:

1. You have a release that is working all the way to production
2. Someone for some reason update the variables for that release
3. You create a new release with a new code base, deploy it and the deployment fails
4. You now want to rollback to the previous release and this also fails because of the changes to variables

The feature is great, but I guess we just need to be cautions. And happy deployment!!!

Cheers