Hi. I am trying to upgrade our flow from tags to contract selectors and I stumbled upon chicken or an egg problem that was already there but I hoped that contract selector will solve it. I have working process for https://docs.pact.io/pact_nirvana/step_7 but how should I handle the first time when I publish new contract between two services? I have two repositories with branch

feature/abc

containing first contract between two services. I cannot merge consumer as it will fail

can-i-deploy

(provider supporting contract is not yet deployed on target environment). If I merge provider it won't record deployment as contract selector looks for main branch and release/deployed pacts. Pending pacts and WIP pacts won't help as this contract was already verified from branch so selector returns no contracts when run from main branch after merge, it won't fail build just because the annotation

@IgnoreNoPactsToVerify

. It seems that I have to manually verify against branch

feature/abc

, rerun deployment pipeline to register deployment and then I can start merging consumer. Is there any valid way to do that without the need to manually running verification or hardcoding branch

feature/abc

in the selector? Did I miss something?

say your consumer’s branch

feature/abc

implements consuming data from a new endpoint. What’s the danger in rolling out (and recording the act) of your provider’s branch

feature/abc

assuming that it doesn’t break contracts of already rolled out consumers?

Thr problem is that typically you would use commit id to calculate pacticipant version. Merge to main branch (release) creates new merge commit. If you implement version selector as documented CI after merge will search for contract that was: • Released to any of the environments • Main branch of consumer Which will return nothing as the only place where the contract exists is still branch

feature/abc

of the consumer. So verification will verify against zero contracts so provider version won't be registered in pact broker. Therefore you cannot register deployment of this version as it was never created in the pact broker.

oh, this is a new provider then?

Yes

right, and the provider exists in the broker already?

You have to record provider deployment first as if you followed the pact nirvana (https://docs.pact.io/pact_nirvana/step_7#add-can-i-deploy-to-environments-to-your-pr-pipelines) then you won't be able to even merge consumer due to can-I-deployment failing.

how so? IIUC if you roll out the provider with branch

feature/abs

, and you record the rollout, then the consumer should be able to roll out as well (branch

feature/abc

), no?

I do not have rollout from feature branches only from main branch where matching by branch name won't work.

right, I see, interesting. We might actually be running into the same problem: new provider (we’re the consumer), and the provider can’t find our contracts for some reason. They’ve never rolled out, etc.