Hello, we are also looking forward to have some information about this. We are evaluating the Atlassian Suite and this is a "MUST HAVE" 

I'm using bamboo version 6.3.1 build 60306, but still dont know what exact solution for it. What do we have to support this case if we marked this ticket resolved without any solution.

What mentioned in this ticket's description is not truly a solution.

The 1st way just only re-use stage idea, not a completely build plan template.

The 2nd one is not entirely template, it required we clone a lot of build plan (manually) then replace them whenever we need.

Still wait for update from bamboo team on this concern.

Thank you.

Try Bamboo 6.0 now.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BAMBOO/Bamboo+Specs

Note that we do not have a full coverage of Bamboo features for now, but we'll get there.

Are there any news about this feature?

Just want to check when can we have this release?

We have a similar situation. We're moving away from permanent cloud instances for certain sorts of testing and development to a more flexible approach.

The new way of doing things is to create servers and whole mini-production environments with several different service machines. Scripting their creation and provisioning them is easy. Each of these services uses artifacts from any of several projects which we build using Bamboo. Currently we have to create deployment environments by hand for each machine that might for each applicable coding project. That wasn't a problem when the computing inventory was stable. Now that it's more volatile the whole thing cries out for automation. Bamboo will be a lot more useful to us when it supports automated creation and deprecation of these environments.

If you are disappointed, switch to Jenkins or TeamCity, they both have build plan templating.

This is disappointing.

Following up on my previous comment: My company has over 50k employees and our division is the only one using Bamboo. The rest are using various tools, with Jenkins being the most common. We've been using Bamboo on our team since 2008 and have grown to three separate bamboo servers covering almost 8,000 build plans. We're not anxious to move to a different tool, but it seems like Atlassian's attention is focused elsewhere and Bamboo is rapidly joining the long list of "forgotten" applications that Atlassian maintains but never improves. We've decided to give Bamboo another 6 months, but if we're not seeing any movement we're prepared to move. With this many build plans, the lack of templates and the lack of any REST api to create build plans is quite a pain.

Hi everyone,

Build and deployment templates are now at the top of the backlog and one of our main priority for 2016. I agree with the feedback given here, templates will be a great asset to onboard people, introduce standards for configuration as well as help teams to manage large amounts of plans.

We haven't been able to ship it yet as we focused this year on improving our Cloud experience and building better integrations with Docker and AWS. Tackling scale is going to be a greater focus area in the upcoming year. We know that addressing this particular request is going to be key to our success. As usual I cannot commit to any deadline but I can open up on the main priorities that we will be having.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for trusting us and for your patience. We really want to keep you happy and we will do our best to delight you even more in the upcoming months.

Regards,

Sten Pittet
Senior Product Manager - Bamboo

Well said Steve, I'll echo that exact same use case and motivation. Atlassian, your users (as seen here) want to see you succeed but we're hanging on waiting for a feature set that would not just make you competitive but bring you up to general expectations of a build server. These requests should be taken seriously as they are voiced from users that desire to, as Steve put it, evangelize your product.

The lack of templating is a pain point particularly when a team of Bamboo novices automates a large number of repositories for the first time. When you're new to the product, your understanding of how the tool can benefit you grows quickly. You might learn a new, generally applicable technique in each of the first twenty plans you configure. If you discover a new technique while configuring your twentieth plan, it becomes burdensome to go back and apply that same change to nineteen other plans. My organization has built out nearly one-hundred plans in a few short months, so we are feeling this pain point acutely.

That this most acutely affects new users who are still learning your product should be concerning. Atlassian is missing the opportunity to make a good first impression, to excite developers about using the product to improve their lives every day, and to impassion them to evangelize the product to their peers.

Me too. This is the biggest obstacle we have in our Company to grow the use of Bamboo.

I really hope development is underway for this feature. The pace of innovation within Bamboo seems pretty slow of late and the product was barely even mentioned at the Atlassian Summit this year. My company is currently evaluating whether we want to continue with our Bamboo instances or if we'd be better off just adopting Jenkins. The difficulty we face around templating and around automating build plan creation is a key factor in this.

Has there been any product updates on this feature since august?

The lack of support for templates is becoming a larger problem for us every day as we are building more and more build plans to cover all of our enterprise applications. Rather than having each one be completely unique, we would get huge benefit from creating templates. Thoughtworks Crusie-GO has this feature in addition to TeamCity.

If it were up to me I'd like a way to export the configuration of one or more plans to a file (any syntax) then be able to re-import them again (with changes). When I need to make a set of changes to a large number of plans, or even just examine a number of plans to be sure that they have the right settings, it would be so much easier to export the configuration into an XML or JSON or whatever file, review and modify them using an editor, then re-import them, rather than pointing-and-clicking through 10's or 100+ plans via the GUI.

This is great news Sten! Thank you for the update. Is there an epic or story that represents the work from a user standpoint so we can also chime in on our use cases?

Hi,

I just wanted to provide an update on this request. I have to be careful with my words here as I do not want to set the wrong expectations but I can say that we're planning on starting the development of Jobs Templates in the last quarter of the year.

As said before we've done numerous spiking to understand the issue and the options that we had and we believe that we are now in a position where we can start moving ahead.

Thanks,

Sten Pittet
Bamboo Product Manager

For the moment guys have a look at the plugin https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/org.valens.bamboo-templatedplans-plugin

It is free, source code is on GitHub.

Hi,

At this stage it is too early for us to say when we will be able to implement build and deployment templates. We have done an early spike to understand the overall complexity of the task. From this first assessment we do not think that we will be able to tackle it in the next 6 months but it's something that we have on our horizon.

Thanks,

Sten Pittet
Bamboo Product Manager

+1

Someone bump this and the lack of plan versioning up the list

I personally think that Go's template feature is a fine example for what Bamboo should be capable of - it provides a simple approach for creating plans/pipelines with a pre-defined set of stages, jobs and tasks. We have a significant amount of jobs (a couple of hundreds) and at least 80% of these jobs are pretty much identical (i.e. checkout, build, unit test, integration test, deploy). We're greatly benefitting from convention over configuration in the build process, but not having templates in Bamboo is a very serious obstacle that disturbs our process automation attempts. Since remote control and automation generally seem to play a minor role in Bamboo (lack of templates, read only REST API, ...) we are considering moving to software that appears more mature (TeamCity) or at least more flexible (Jenkins).

Templating is main thing which makes people choose Teamcity instead of Bamboo. Bamboo is great: intergation with Stash & Jira, excelent deployment capabilities, pretty look. But maintaining plans without templates makes me sad. This feature-lack makes Bamboo look like very young beta-version but not an enterprise-class software.

Build stages can be created using Build Steps in TeamCity and configuring the interdependency between the build steps and ensuring all the steps run on the same agent .

Team City lacks build stages and an integrated deployment manager; in that respect it is more suitable for Continuous Delivery than Bamboo. But in every other respect, yes TeamCity is way ahead on features, particularly with regard to support for software development other than pure Java.

I would go with TeamCity as currently Bamboo is way behind TeamCity in terms of features.

At the same time the CI server should have no impact in choosing other Atlassian products.

We are currently evaluating alternatives to hudson. We turn our attention towards Teamcity, Jenkins and Go, because templating is an importing requirement for us. So if you have any plans whatsoever in this direction give us some hint or loose a potential customer.

Know that this could lead to us looking for alternatives for other atlassian tools we are currently using (jira, confluence, fisheye) and stall investments in new atlassian products like crucible and clover. If you need more input on requirements just ask.

Just to add one more voice/vote: We are evaluating Bamboo as a replacement for our Jenkins installation and so far we see the obvious selling points (model reflects real-world situation much better with plans, stages, jobs, tasks and integration with other atlassian products) but not even being able to create jobs as copies from an existing job will likely be a deal-breaker because we have a lot of repositories, most of our Jenkins jobs are almost identical (different repositoy url or maybe a gradle param changes) and we build on several platforms which results in a huge multiplier.

Please, do something about this. Even if it is as simple as in Jenkins (Form field 'copy from existing' with a combo displaying jobs from the projects the current user has access to and the same for plans and maybe even tasks), it is a life-saver and definitely a must in environments like ours.

Agreed - my team is evaluating Team City right now and that is a huge pull to use their software instead of Bamboo. We love our other atlassian products but a build server can make or break team productivity and in order to maintain 50 plans we need templates to reduce maintenance overhead. Please provide an update to us with details on if & ideally when this may be available!

Any progress on this issue? This is a huge pain for us at the moment

I think it's currently too cumbersome to use Bamboo with a large number of (Git) repositories. This should be as simple as choosing a source repository, one or more plan templates (including permissions, notifications, variables, etc) and maybe even the same for JIRA.

It would be even better, if JIRA/Bamboo would do this automatically as a new Bitbucket or Stash repository is created: New repository with a pom.xml? Use the Maven Template! Make file? Make Template!

Sometimes all you want is a repository with a couple of files, but the overhead for the build and release chain currently discourages this.

Yes, we could also use this. We don't have a huge number of plans (as yet), but enough that adding new stages along with subcomponents is a drag.

Any updates on when templates will be added?
Most Bamboo's competitive products can support this already, including Open Source ones.

Indeed, this is the biggest thing stopping us moving from TeamCity.

Most Bamboo's competitive products can support this already. Management questioned about the high licensing cost while a simple feature like this is not present compares to its competitors.

We also need this feature. The lack of templatization will hinder adoption in favor of TeamCity. The template could be just another project with a flag marking it as template, and the see-through functionality needed to keep the project linked to its template and its variables inherited might come for free if we allow variables left empty in the project to be interpreted as inherited from the linked template. At least in a firts iteration.

I have been achieving this in Jenkins via "This build is parameterized" and adding a choice parameter and or a string parameter. I can't find a way to do this in Bamboo yet?

We have a similar need (though far fewer plans right now). This would be a great and welcome addition to Bamboo.