Run Plans

Run plan or simply Plan is the basic scheduled block. You can only schedule plans in application. Which means you can not schedule individual tasks or groups. If you need to schedule a task first you have to create a plan and put that task to that plan. Run plans contain many related tasks. For example you may schedule a plan that runs every day on 10 PM and create tasks and select that plan as the run time of the task. A task can only have one run plan. If you need to run the task in different plans, you have to duplicate the task with a different name. To create a run plan, click on the Run Plans link on the side menu and click the Create Plan button if you have not created a plan before, If you have other plan(s) then on the plans table click the plus button to add a new plan. Then enter the plan properties and press the Save button. Plan properties are explained below;

Name: Unique name of the plan

Connection: A default connection for all the tasks under that plan. This connection can be overridden on the task level.

Schedule: Schedule is a cron expression.

Parallel: Maximum parallel task count under that plan. For example if this property is set to 20 then there can be only 20 tasks running at the same time.

Priority: Priority of the tasks of that plan compared to other tasks of other plans.

Active: Yes/No property. Only active plans can run on the system. You can select no and deactivate a plan if you do not want to run the tasks of that plan. One additional detail here, you can not create an active plan. Although octopus does not run the plans without tasks the UI prevents you from running the plan immediately after you create the first tasks. for example if you want to create 10 tasks for that plan, you create the plan as inactive and create the ten tasks then you can activate the plan.

Protected: This is also an easy to confuse feature of the application like the active flag. Lets try to explain this feature with an example; Suppose you created a plan that runs every 5 minutes. But soon you realized that sometimes it takes more than 5 minutes for the plan to complete and session of that plan begins executing which may interfere with the previously running tasks. Sometimes that interference causes errors. To prevent this situation you can set to Protected flag to yes and ensure that there is only one running session of the plan at the same time.

Description: Description for that plan.