README.md

Make Concourse retrieve an older version of a resource

The problem

After Concourse retrieves the latest version of a newly configured resource, it will not retrieve previous versions of that resource automatically anymore, even if those old versions are explicitly referred by the pipeline parameters.

In order to force Concourse to retrieve an older version of a resource, use the fly CLI command with check-resource.

For example, in the sample pipeline further below, when you try to run job unit-test for the first time, it will get stuck waiting for Concourse to retrieve version 2.5.0 (an older version) of the fly-release resource while it shows the following message:

waiting for a suitable set of input versions
concourse-release - pinned version {"tag":"v2.5.0"} is not available

The solution

For that job to run, execute the following fly command to force Concourse to retrieve version 2.5.0 of the fly-release resource:

fly -t <your-target-alias> check-resource --resource <your-pipeline-name>/fly-release --from tag:v2.5.0

Sample pipeline

---
resources:
- name: fly-release
  type: github-release
  source:
    user: concourse
    repository: concourse
jobs:
- name: unit-test
  plan:
  - do:
    - get: concourse-release
      version: { tag: 'v2.5.0' }
      params: { globs: ["fly_linux_amd64"] }
    - task: test-release
      config:
        platform: linux
        image_resource:
          type: docker-image
          source: { repository: alpine }
        inputs:
        - name: fly-release
        run:
          path: sh
          args:
          - -exc
          - |
            cat ./fly-release/version

The complete definition file for the sample pipeline above is available for download here.

Back to Concourse Pipeline Hacks