How to enable the across step feature in Concourse BOSH deployment

Products

• Concourse for VMware Tanzu

Issue/Introduction

The concourse across step modifier allows you to run a step multiple times with different combinations of variable values. More details on this feature, as well as examples, can be found here:

https://concourse-ci.org/docs/steps/modifier-and-hooks/across/

In Concourse v8, this feature is enabled by default and is available for use in your pipelines. This article will describe how to enable it for Concourse v7.

Environment

Concourse deployed with BOSH

Resolution

To enable this feature, create an operations file called across.yml, and populate it like so:

- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=web/jobs/name=web/properties/enable_across_step?
  value: true

Then run a bosh deploy with the -o flag pointing to it. For example:

bosh deploy -d concourse cluster/concourse.yml -l versions.yml -l variables.yml -o cluster/operations/basic-auth.yml -o cluster/operations/across.yml --vars-store cluster-creds.yml

This will update the web VM, enabling the feature.