The can-i-deploy tool is a CLI that ensures you are safe to deploy a consumer or provider into a given environment. To do this, it queries the Pact Broker to ensure that there is a successful verification result between the existing application versions and the application version you're about to deploy.

If you deploy to a test environment as part of your build pipeline, you may find yourself in the situation where the verification result is unknown because the provider build is still running. What typically would happen is that a changed pact would trigger a provider build via a webhook in the Pact Broker, and the provider may not have finished before can-i-deploy is invoked.

To help out in this scenario, you can now use the following two options to let the can-i-deploy command poll until all the verification results arrive.

[--retry-while-unknown=TIMES] 
              # The number of times to retry while there is an unknown
              # verification result 
              # (ie. the provider verification is likely still running)
              # Default: 0
[--retry-interval=SECONDS]
              # The time between retries in seconds. 
              # Use in conjuction with --retry-while-unknown
              # Default: 10

Remember, however, that changes to pacts are best introduced on feature branches of your consumer. This allows your pact to be "pre-verified" by the time the branch is merged into master, which will mean can-i-deploy should never block your master build.

You can read about how to do this in The steps to reaching Pact Nirvana.

Want to use this new feature? You'll need version 1.48.0 or later of the Pact CLI, and version 2.23.4 or later of the Pact Broker

Pact is a tool for implementing "consumer driven contracts" - a technique for testing integrations without using traditional integration tests. It was first written at realestate.com.au to help a team of developers escape the integration test hell of a rapidly expanding HTTP microservices network, and has since grown to become an open source project for contract testing in multiple languages and protocols.

Since its creation in 2013, Pact has come a long way. We're always adding new features in response to the feedback we get from our users and our own experience, but recently we've realised that we've done a poor job of letting everyone know about the awesome new things we've added along the way.

So, we've started docs.pact.io/blog as a place to let everyone know about new features in Pact, to share people's Pact experiences (good and bad!), and to help build a community of Pact users who can help each other. If you haven't already, please join us at slack.pact.io, and if you'd like to contribute a post to our blog, chat to us on the #blog channel.