The

can-i-deploy

command takes an

--ignore

parameter that allows me to specify multiple pacticipants to ignore for the purposes of the deploy check. Is it possible I can tell this command to treat absence of any pacticipant from the target environment as ignorable? The reason for this is twofold: • Its not necessarily an error that a given peer pacticipant isn't in the deployment environment; I have different environments that require different mixes of pacticipants. • Its very brittle to have to state what must be ignored because this might change over time as new components are added; I have to go through each environment figuring out whether new component X is expected for environment E and if not add it to the ignore list.

I don’t believe

can-i-deploy

will fail for a provider, if there are no consumers in a target environment

That's the case (consumer fail if provider not deployed) that I'm having the issues with; if the consumer is e.g. an API gateway with a configurable set of backends (the providers), each deployment may have a different mix of "required" providers. Having to do this by exclusion (i.e. the

--ignored

switch) is pessimal because every time a new provider appears we have to go through all deployments adjusting the ignore list. If we had a global "ignore missing" switch or even the opposite

--dontIgnore

that would be much less brittle.

I'm confused about why the gateway would be deployed with a contract to a non existent provider?

Think of the gateway as being deployment-time configurable in terms of what providers it will need; not all providers are needed in all deployments.

So I wonder if that can be delt with using other means (e.g. tags or environments)

The way I'm dealing with it at the moment is to associate different ignore lists with different environment (tags), but as I say its brittle. So I'm making that judgement already via the

ignore

flag (i.e. don't worry about this provider for this deployment). I think in practice this approach would be more tractable in my particular use case if I were able to use

dontIgnore

because as the number of environments grows it becomes harder to manage the arrival of new providers. But I understand your concerns around inadvertently missing a provider where it's needed; however I wouldn't suggest this kind of behaviour were the default - as with

ignore

its a case of caveat developer.