Patcher Architecture

Environments

Patcher allows teams to define environments as groupings of folders using glob patterns. Patcher commands on the CLI and in GitHub Actions accept arguments to match these folders. For example, the patcher-action argument include_dirs: "{*prod*}/**" matches all folders containing "prod" in their name. A single environment can include one or multiple folders without any set limit. Patcher scans the entire group of folders simultaneously for potential updates and changes.

There are no restrictions on the number of environments or the naming structure you can use.

In the future, you'll model environments using a configuration-based system integrated with Gruntwork Pipelines, offering greater flexibility in organizing folder structures.

Dependencies

A dependency in Patcher workflows refers to versioned code that your codebase references, typically a OpenTofu or Terraform module stored in a Git repository and tagged with a specific version. For example, if your OpenTofu/Terraform source module is gruntwork-io/terraform-aws-messaging.git//modules/sqs?ref=v0.8.0, the corresponding dependency is gruntwork-io/terraform-aws-messaging/sqs.

Patcher organizes promotion workflows by grouping changes per dependency. It identifies all instances of gruntwork-io/terraform-aws-messaging/sqs within a specified environment and generates a single pull request to update the dependency to the next appropriate version.