Set Branch Triggers

You can automate re-pointing from one branch to another by using branch triggers. A branch trigger is a relationship between two branches, such as master and staging. When the head commit of staging meets a certain condition, it triggers master to update its head to that same commit. In other words, it does pachctl create branch data@master --head staging automatically when the trigger condition is met.

You can set branch triggers to fire when:

• A certain amount of time has passed (--trigger-cron)
• A specific number of commits have been made (--trigger-size)
• The amount of unprocessed data reaches a certain size (--trigger-commits)

When more than one is specified, a branch repoint will be triggered when any of the conditions is met. To guarantee that they all must be met, add --trigger-all.

How to Automate Deferred Processing via Branch Triggers #

Let’s make the master branch automatically trigger when there’s 1 Megabyte of new data on the staging branch.

1. Create a repo.

pachctl create repo data

2. Create a master branch with trigger settings (see pachctl create branch options) and a staging branch.

pachctl create branch data@master --trigger staging --trigger-size 1MB
pachctl create branch data@staging

3. View your branches.

pachctl list branch data 

BRANCH  HEAD                             TRIGGER              
staging f35c5e5d6b4c499eaae0ab0c733ad7a6 -                    
master  383c2acb298e4d6aa8327ea49aaeede6 staging on Size(1MB) 

💡

Triggers can point to branches that don’t exist yet. You can test your trigger using a command similar to the following:

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=1 | pachctl put file data@staging:/file
pachctl list branch data

BRANCH  HEAD                             TRIGGER              
staging 5e27464aab4c4857bfd5d402afe043c6 -                    
master  5e27464aab4c4857bfd5d402afe043c6 staging on Size(1MB) 

How to Manually Trigger Master #

Triggers automate deferred processing, but they don’t prevent manually updating the head of a branch. If you ever want to trigger master even though the trigger condition hasn’t been met, you can run:

pachctl create branch data@master --head staging

Notice that you don’t need to re-specify the trigger when you call create branch to change the head. If you do want to clear the trigger delete the branch and recreate it.

To experiment further, see the full triggers example.