Missing Create Release button
Asked by Bill Mertz:

I have been using Bamboo for about 2 years. It is installed locally. Normally, when I build a plan branch, in the build activity screen, I get a Create Release button if the build was successful. Today, for the first time, I do not get a Create Release button. I don't know why.

We also use Jira. Starting on Monday of this week, we switched from sprints to kanban. Does this have anything to do with it? I have been reading posts in the community that suggest it might.

To be clear, these are the steps I am taking:

1. In the build plan, I create a new plan branch. I choose the branch that was just created and is ready for QA

2. I run the plan branch

3. I click on the Build menu Build Activity item. I choose the build that is currently building.

4. In this screen, I can watch the build progress. When it finished, a Create Release button should show up, but it does not.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Answers:
author: Gerhard Forster
body: Hi Bill,

Thanks for your question about the "Create Release" button, repectively the fact that you find it missing. I cross checked that for you, triggering a build creating an artifact on one of my local Bamboo instances and found the button mentioned by you being created under the below two conditions.

1. Build succeeds. Otherwise within "... failed" message, on the right hand side, there pop up two different buttons which are "Assign responsible" and "Claim full responsibility".
2. A deployment environment needs to be linked to this build plan. If not, the field on the right side of "Build result summary" keeps simply empty.

However, in any further conditions of triggering this and further build plans, button "Create Release" always appears for me.

That said, this build plan really succeeds? Better check that out per your build logs. And you did not perform any changes related to this plan's deployment environment so that accidentially there is no more deployment connected to this build? That could explain that you no more see this button.

Now since you pointed out using Jira together with Bamboo and a Kanban board for your projetc there, I also experimented with this. For that I first made the working build fail. Then, within my Kaban test project, I created a new bug and that one I added to this Bamboo build failure per "Add linked issues" in the right upper corner of this plan's Build dashboard, on tab Issues.

I made the build work again, built it manually for test purpose and moved back to Jira. There I moved the ticket through, from "ToDo", via "In Progress" to Done. Then, on Jira side, I went to the "Releases" page and defined something like "Release-Candidate-3" there. Now an importent part, that I was struggling with for some time is that in your Jira issue you need to set "Fix Version/s" to that release. Once you do that, this Jira issue is listed as a release item.

Now on the Jira Release page navigating to the "..." on the right side of the defined release and clicking on that, you find "Release", "Build and Release" among other options. Selecting "Build and Release" guides you to some further selections and once done and confirmed, it starts running this build on Bamboo side.

You see the green-ish rotaing Cog on the Jira page and, if you are fast enough flipping over to Bamboo or the build takes long enough, you should also see this build plan being executed under *Build \>\> Build activity*. When finished, you should encounter the green hook on the Jira release page in the right upper corner, along with build date and the created artifact.

Thus the build run triggered by Jira.

On Bamboo I see in this plan's Build dashboard the build's log, artifact, etc. and on tab "Summary" together with a bunch of Jira information like *jira.projectKey* , *jira.projectName* and more a message saying "No release with the artifacts of this build exists yet" and button "Create Release" below. That seems logical to me, as we solely run the build and no deployment. Per pressing button "Create Release" this will should be done.

Perhaps I'm still missing a plugin on Jira side, so that also the deployment and thus the release process can be kicked off directly from Jira too. In that case, a "Create Release" button would not make any sense and thus should indeed be missing for Bamboo.

Jira Community could know more about that.

If you revert your Jira project behavior to how it was recently, is Bamboo behaving as expected again? If so, it seems much like Jira impacts Bamboo behavior here and likely already performs a build and a deployment directly.

We hope that our investigation could clarify things a bit and wish you all the best. For any further doubt or ask, feel free to just come back to us.

Thanks and and stay healthy!  
Gerhard