Adding approval jobs to your CI pipeline

Implementing an explicit approval process in a continuous integration pipeline can reduce production issues, provide an audit trail, and increase confidence in code deployments. This approach involves adding a request-approval job to the pipeline using the xMatters orb, which notifies on-call approvers across various devices. Approvers can then approve or reject the request, and upon approval, a request is made to CircleCI’s API to proceed with deployment. The setup requires a CircleCI account, an xMatters account, and a project repository needing an approval job. Configuration involves updating the .circleci/config.yml file, setting the XM_URL value, and storing a personal token in xMatters. The process targets engineering managers for approvals and continues the pipeline after successful approval, ensuring changes to production code are carefully overseen.