Hi guys! I'm adopting Pact on my project. Maybe I misunderstood it. Considering Pact.Net v4, shouldn't

IPactUriOptions

provide an ability to publish verification results similar to

IPactBrokerOptions

? Example: a contract is changed and published to PactFlow, then a webhook triggers a provider CI to check the contract, then we need to publish verification results back to PactFlow

Since the recommended way is to use the CLI tools (based on this doc) I would expect that publishing contracts would eventually get removed from the libraries, but that's literally just my own guess. I haven't seen anything mentioned about it here in Slack.

You're right regarding publish a contract itself. But I'm concerned more about publishing a contract verification result by provider. Not sure if it's possible to do via CLI

Ahh, sorry I misread a bit. Technically, it is possible depending on how you do the verifications. I personally run the verification of contracts using the Rust based

pact_verifier_cli

tool in my pipelines to verify the contracts for a provider. But that's a bit different case. But indeed I'm not aware if you could just publish some verification results from a verification run made with the libraries. I doubt that since it probably doesn't produce any files?

Here is an excerpt of my code for provider

That’s a good question. I think it is supported, I’ll search back up the slack threads, I’m sure this has been asked before but I can’t recall the answer

The URI option doesn't support publishing results, no. A pact can come from any URI, so it doesn't make sense to publish verification results. It could be a random repo on GitHub, or a CI artefact from TeamCity or Jenkins. Publishing results might make no sense at all. Results are something you publish to a broker, so you'd use the broker source for that. It would be weird to get the pact from a broker via URI instead of the broker source, but then to also want to publish results back to the broker. It's also weird to grab pacts from somewhere other than the broker but then publish the results of that to a broker.

Adam, thank you very much for detailed answer! I asked about that following this documentation. "When a pact has changed, a webhook in the Pact Broker will kick off a build of the provider, passing through the URL of the pact that has changed". I understood it in a way that we can provide a link to a changed pact (from some feature branch) in Pact broker to a provider CI that will build 'main' branch and then return verification result back to the Broker. Or if it's not correct then I believe we can pass a branch name via webhook request to a provider CI to use

ConsumerVersionSelector

as for regular pact verification

Interesting! Yeah I'm not sure I agree with that documentation. It's certainly not how I've ever used it in practice. I just kick off the entire provider run again and verify everything. I'm not sure if the FFI supports publishing verification results with URI sources either. I'll check.

Thanks!

So yeah, I’d recommend just redoing the entire provider run. Publishing duplicate verification options isn’t a problem.

No, that’s not the recommended flow. In step 6 of the CI/CD setup guide, you can verify a specific pact version with the webhook: https://docs.pact.io/pact_nirvana/step_6#add-can-i-deploy-to-consumer-pr-pipeline. This is how you ensure there are no “gaps” in coverage, meaning no surprises for use of

can-i-deploy

I believe this is what David is talking about. You can re-run the verification, but it does mean that the verification options are broad enough to verify the specific pact that was changed which is not always the case.

It’s also weird to grab pacts from somewhere other than the broker but then publish the results of that to a broker.

In this case, the URI is a broker URL. It’s just a path to the contract, not a hypermedia relation to discover the pacts to verify.

I can’t even tell from the FFI code if it’s supported or not. You set the publish options but you never pass a broker URL, so how would it know where to publish the results to?

It should be possible, but I can see why you can’t infer that from the APIs. If the URI is a pact broker URL, it should have the correct relations in it to publish a result In this case, I believe you can set the values of

pactffi_verifier_set_publish_options

. @uglyog is my understanding correct?

Matt, you got me right 👍 More over I have a feeling that this code path (with PactUrl) worked fine in Pact.Net v3. Meaning it sent verification results back to Pact Broker. While exploring Pact framework a year ago in my team we created a POC based on V3. And as I remember it worked back then. So maybe current implementation (v4) works differently

Yeah. Adam has re-written the guts of it to use a new core module written in Rust (much faster, new features, fixes Ruby long path issue etc. etc.). But it’s still new-ish and is not well documented for how to sequence the calls for all of the use cases. So based on the FFI interfaces it’s not obvious this is a thing that can be done

I'm still not sure from the API that it can be done? The function for setting publish options doesn't have an argument for passing a broker URL. Do the FFI internals magically extract the host if you use the URI source and use it as a broker source? That sounds dangerous to me. There's nothing to validate that the host of a URI source even is a broker, or that it's the correct broker. And what happens if you set the publish options but use a file source? Where would it get the broker URL from? That either doesn't work or at best it's all very opaque, and not something I really want to try and build a sensible API around as it stands today.

Thank you, Adam 👍

https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-net/issues/392 is closed now

Awesome) Thanks!