Hey Octopus — Managing Variables Should Be Easier Than This.

Octopus — If you manage the release or deployment of software this is a must. For those not in the know visit https://octopus.com/features. Essentially they take your built apps, and put them in the right place to work properly. And they do it well.

But if you’re listening Octopus I have a small gripe, and its this page here:

Octopus Variable sets page

Now I’m primarily a SAAS developer who deals with ASP.NET, and occasionally django. This is a page that stores sets of variables, that can be done post-build. So for instance within the settings.json file, or the web.config. Its a great page, you can see all the settings by name, and each of their values, in every scope where a value is. All nicely laid out and intuitive.

There s also a corresponding page for each project within octopus. that does a similar thing. This applies to both of them.

When we first start octopus we usually have all of our settings within a settings document (settings.json, or an xml file like web.config). What would really make things easier for onboarding would be the ability to upload directly these files. Maybe get a popup asking for which scope we want to upload to.

As a second part to this feature request is the fear that maybe Octopus might possibly one day not be there. As responsible engineers we should have a backup of these variable sets. This would be so much easier if we could download these same varible sets into a simmilar scoped json or XML download.