Continuous delivery platform provider Octopus Deploy has announced a GitHub Copilot Extension that increases efficiency and helps developers stay in the flow.
The Octopus extension responds to plain text chat queries from Copilot with relevant information from customers’ Octopus instances, making it simpler to connect Octopus and GitHub for deployments. The Octopus extension, the company wrote in a blog, was created “to provide a middle ground between the web-based UI and the REST API.” Before the extension, the only answer to performing tasks that couldn’t be done via the web UI was to write custom scripts to interact with the REST API.
Three prerequisites to run the extension are an Octopus Cloud instance, an API key and a GitHub Copilot account.
“The Octopus extension will enable our customers to have natural conversations around the state of their deployments running in production,” Harsh Sabikhi, SVP of Worldwide Revenue at Octopus Deploy, said in the announcement. “It will reduce context switching and increase efficiency by helping developers stay in the flow.”
According to Octopus Deploy, the extension integrates with GitHub Copilot Chat and gives users the ability to pull information from Octopus about deployments, such as:
● Summaries of the state of deployments
● Access to reporting in logs and security vulnerabilities
● Reporting and statistics around deployments
● Step-by-step instructions straight from Octopus documentation
“The Octopus extension allows anyone to query the state of application deployments, generate custom reports such as a markdown table showing the release version, release notes and status of the last 5 deployments, and discover the features and platforms used by deployment processes,” said Matthew Casperson, Solutions Engineer at Octopus Deploy, in the statement. “The natural language interface implemented by Octopus Copilot exposes valuable business knowledge without requiring a deep understanding of Octopus, removing a barrier for those who want quick answers to deployment-related questions. They can ask questions of their Octopus instance as if they were talking to an Octopus expert.”
The Octopus extension is available in limited public beta. Invited users can install the extension on GitHub Marketplace. Learn more about the Octopus extension here.
