How to recognize different events in CircleCI

[Hamed]

Hello all,

I have a simple question but unfortunately, I couldn’t find it searching! And I am a newbie in CircleCI and coding so feel free to explain plain things.

I am using config.yml version 2 for our automated deployment using CircleCI integrated with Bitbucket. I want to know how can I recognize which events from Bitbucket triggered the pipeline? for example was it Push, PR update, or Merge? I have already selected my desired webhooks in the Bitbucket setting.
So in simple words, I need to do something like this in my config.yml:

- run:
      name: Which-event-triggered
      command: |
        if [ $event == "PR_updated" ];
        then
          ./an_script.sh
        else
          ./another_script.sh
        fi

Any bits of help or ideas would be really appreciated.
Thanks,
Hamed!

[nbialostosky]

Hi @Hamed!

Welcome to Discuss and great question – this is a bit of a tricky one!

To clarify some details, we don’t have a specific event type variable in CircleCI, we receive the webhook and it contains commit details. However, there could be some ways to check for this information.

1. We will automatically set a variable called CIRCLE_PULL_REQUEST if the commit that triggered the build is associated with an open Pull Request.
2. We have an API endpoint that allows you to get all commit details associated with a build:
   https://circleci.com/docs/api/v1/#single-job

With the above in mind, you could at the very least tell if the commit is associated with a PR with something like:

- run: 
    name: If associated with PR
    command: |
      if [ -n "$CIRCLE_PULL_REQUEST" ]; then
        echo "This is part of a PR!"
      else
        echo "This isn't part of a PR!"
      fi

Alternatively, if the above doesn’t work, you could modify your processes on your end for merging in PR’s and merging to open PR’s to include specific information or key identifier in the commit subject.

You could then use the API endpoint I mentioned to parse out (likely with jq) the commit details and look for specific matchings in order to proceed with a specific part of the script.

Hopefully the above helps and please let me know if you have any further questions!

[Hamed]

Hi @nbialostosky,
Thanks for your reply and help.
For my exact situation, it works fine now. I wanted it to:

1- Run deploy to the DEV server whenever one of our team members approves a pull request from Bitbucket (unfortunately CircleCI doesn’t take action on approving PR event from Bitbucket, even though I removed the created PR from webhooks and Approve is the first event in its kind) so we have to make an Update on PR and CircleCI does take action on it. (So not bad for a start)

2- Run deploy to the Staging server whenever someone merges this PR to the master branch.

Using the > CIRCLE_PULL_REQUEST in the if then else block which you mentioned helped me executing different scripts for deployment to different environments.

For other scenarios, I will definitely need to go for the API endpoints as a beginner
Can you please suggest any simple tutorial to start with APIs?
Thanks a million.

[nbialostosky]

You’re welcome and happy to hear it!

As for the API side of things, we have some examples of utilizing the API in bash scripts here:

Example bash script using Insights to get credits used for a workflow

Hi There! Recently the Support team created a script for easily getting the total number of credits used on a workflow. This was created since the insights endpoint for workflow credits is scoped per branch, which means you need to do an API call per branch to get this information. This script will likely need to be modified to be used for your purposes, but should be a good starting point! A few notes/caveats: It will only look at branches from the last 100 builds The credit data that is r…

And here:

Example bash script to get job artifacts from pipeline

Hi There! Recently the Support team created a script for easily getting artifacts from a pipeline. This was created since the artifacts are associated with the jobs in the pipeline, it requires finding the jobs and returning the results. This script will likely need to be modified to be used for your purposes, but should be a good starting point! A few notes/caveats: It is not setup for pagination, so if you have a lot of jobs associated with your workflows you may need to update to account…

And here:

Example bash script to identify who triggered a workflow

Hello Everyone! Recently the Support team created a script for determining who triggered a workflow by using our v2 API. Feel free to mix up the script how ever you best see fit! Note: We’re making us of jq which makes using JSON in scripts possible Also, if you have an environment variable set with your CIRCLE_API_TOKEN, feel free to delete the variable declaration line from the script! #!/bin/bash -e # This script will return the user who started a workflow # Can be called with "sh name_o…

We also have a thing called CircleCI Academy that has a “General Developer” course that includes information on utilizing the API, you can signup and access here:

CircleCI Academy

Hope that helps!