New Build Tagging Capabilities

We're excited to announce a powerful new capability that significantly enhances how you tag and organize your builds in SeaLights: Automated Build Tagging directly within your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline. This new feature allows you to define custom build tags using pom.xml properties or environment variables, streamlining build identification and visibility across your applications.

Why This Matters

While SeaLights has offered build tagging capabilities, this new feature automates the process of embedding crucial metadata directly into your build process, driven by your CI configuration. Instead of manual tagging or automated tagging using the public API, you can now effortlessly tag builds with specific application IDs, branch names, or any other custom categories relevant to your workflow. This automation leads to:

• Streamlined CI Workflows: Automatically apply tags without manual intervention, saving time and reducing errors in your build pipelines.

• Richer Build Context: Easily identify and categorize builds with relevant information, directly from your source configuration. Examples of use cases include:

  • Linking to an Image ID: Automatically link the build to a specific image ID from your artifactory, providing clear traceability for deployments.

  • Environment Promotion: Mark a specific version that was later promoted to a higher environment (e.g., production), similar to using a "reference build".

• Improved Navigation: Quickly find specific builds based on your custom tags within the SeaLights UI.

• Enhanced Visibility: Key build details are now more accessible and consistently applied.

This capability is currently implemented through the Maven plugin, which reads properties from your pom.xml and environment variables at the end of the build scan to create these tags. Each tag consists of a category name and a tag value.

Seeing Your Tags in SeaLights

Once your build is reported with the new tags, you'll experience enhanced visibility in the SeaLights UI:

When you hover over the application name on the Coverage Dashboard, a tooltip will appear displaying your custom build tags.

These enhancements provide a more intuitive and informative way to manage and understand your builds within SeaLights. We encourage you to start leveraging this new capability to streamline your build identification process!

We Want Your Feedback!

This build tagging capability is a powerful addition, and we're keen to understand its broader applicability. If you would benefit from this functionality in other build tools or technologies beyond Maven, please reach out to our support team and let us know! Your feedback helps us prioritize future developments.