Allow for planning different sets of projects in a PR, regardless of branch attributes in the repo-level config

[dimisjim]

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• I'd be willing to implement this feature (contributing guide)

Describe the user story

I'd like to have what is mentioned here: #254 (comment)

Basically some sort of a flag that allows the following workflow:

• autoplan happens according to the branch filter in the repo-level yaml
• if the user chooses, be able to plan for another "branch"-based project via a comment command, using the -p flag

Describe the solution you'd like

some sort of a server config flag

Describe the drawbacks of your solution

Describe alternatives you've considered

• --enable-regexp-cmd via Feature Suggestion - Allow atlantis plan for all defined projects regardless of files changed #254 (comment)

[jamengual]

This is not recommended because now you are allowing users to bypass the rules added by admins of the repo and go about planning another project outside of the scope of the PR. If you need to plan another project then create another PR.

[dimisjim]

In our case, the atlantis.yaml file is modified on a per-repo basis (because of this limitation / way of repo matchers work on the server-side config currently: #4245), so it's not really about "overriding rules added by admins". Also, in our case, planning for multiple projects is within the scope of the PR (even if the PR is about merging into a particular env branch), coz we would like to run a plan if more than one projects are affected. For example, we have a setup in which a change in dev, could potentially affect qa (assuming that both configs use the same main.tf and the change is there). Do you think it's still not recommended based on this?

EDIT: I've gone around this, using the when_modified option, and completely abandoned the branch one.

EDIT 2: Including a custom run step for apply in my custom project workflow, I've achieved the functionality that I wanted:

qa:
    plan:
      ...
    apply:
      steps:
      - run: |
          if [ "$BASE_BRANCH_NAME" = "qa" ]; then
            echo "we are on qa branch, thus proceeding with the apply!"
            terraform${ATLANTIS_TERRAFORM_VERSION} apply "$PLANFILE"
          else
            echo "we are not on qa branch, thus canceling the apply"
          fi

Thus closing this issue 👍

[jamengual]

when_modify is a good use for this.
I will say that you should do a Dev change and then create a PR for QA apply , prod etc, but this is a "how do we work as a company in our VCS problem" not much of how atlantis does things.