Approvals

An approval pauses a deployment until enough eligible people say yes. Approvals are available on every plan.

Configure on the environment

Approvals are a protection rule of the environment, not of a pipeline, so they apply to every way of deploying there:

# environment protection rules
required_approvals: 2
approvers:
  - { kind: role, id: deployer }
  - { kind: team, id: sre, min_count: 1 }     # per-group quorum
  - { kind: user, id: user_01H... }
allow_self_approval: false                    # default
approval_timeout: 24h

• required_approvals: how many distinct approvals are needed.
• approvers: users, teams or roles that are eligible. min_count sets a per-group quorum (for example “at least one from SRE”). A person must also hold the permission deployments.approve at the environment’s scope.
• allow_self_approval: by default the person who requested a deployment cannot approve it.
• approval_timeout: how long to wait before the approval expires.
• A rejection by any eligible approver rejects the deployment.

Deciding

Channel	How
Web	The Approvals inbox lists everything waiting on you, with the release diff and gate results alongside
Slack	Interactive buttons on the notification; the Slack user must map to a Slipway user with permission
Teams	Adaptive-card actions
CLI	slipway approve dep_01H... -m "comment" or slipway reject ...
API	ApprovalService.DecideApproval

Every decision is recorded with the user, the decision, a comment, a timestamp and the channel (web, slack, teams, api), and appears in the audit log.

Waiting for a deploy job

In a pipeline, a deploy job bound to a protected environment shows waiting_approval and holds its runner slot only after approval: the job is not assigned to a runner until the approval passes, so waiting costs nothing.

Expiry and cancellation

When approval_timeout passes, the approval expires and the deployment fails with that reason. A requester can cancel a waiting deployment (ApprovalService.CancelApproval), which also cancels the approval request.

Good defaults

• Production: 1 or 2 approvers from a team that is not the author’s.
• Staging: no approval, auto-promotion.
• Combine with a deployment window so approvals are not requested at 3 a.m.