Automations overview

Automations are various actions that Runway can take on your behalf during the release process. From big actions like submitting your update to the app stores, to more routine manual tasks like bumping version in code or adding your release notes, our continuing goal is to empower teams to think less about the busywork of preparing releases.

Additionally, since Runway sits between your project management, version control, CI, app stores, Slack and other parts of your toolchain, it’s able to perform unattended tasks where an action needs to happen in a particular tool once the status of another tool changes.

When you have automations turned on, you’ll see the lightning symbol showing up in various locations in the Runway app.

This might be a reminder that Runway is ready to take actions on your behalf (as in the Release timeline, or in the Schedule drawer), or it’s pointing you to a way to check on the status of your pending or completed automations (as in the Automations tab found on many steps).

Certain Runway automations surface an option to Bypass pull requests and allow Runway to commit and push changes to the target branch directly. Learn how to enable pull request bypass for Runway to ensure that the Bypass pull requests automation setting functions properly.

If your team has ideas for a routine part of your process that could be automated away (or something new that would save you time), please get in touch!

Setting up automations

App settings

1. Select an app in the top left corner from the Switcher

2. Navigate to App Settings by clicking the gear icon (⚙️) at the top of the Timeline sidebar

3. Click on Automations in the sidebar

Release steps

You can also enable, disable, or change settings for individual automations on their associated release steps.

Editing automation settings from an individual release will apply those changes to all of your upcoming releases for that app.

How to enable pull request bypass for Runway

By default, any time a Runway automation modifies code in your repository, it will open a pull request with the changes. If you have the Merge pull requests opened by Runway automation enabled, it will attempt to merge the pull request as soon as all checks have passed. However, in many cases teams choose to protect certain branches with required pull requests and lengthy integration checks, and Runway cannot merge open PRs until all of the requirements for the pull request have been met.

Certain Runway automations surface an option to Bypass pull requests and allow Runway to commit and push changes to the target branch directly. Teams may choose to enable this option if code changes are relatively trivial and harmless (e.g. version bumps) and they would prefer not to need to meet strict pull request criteria for these kinds of changes.

If a target branch has branch protections enabled, and the branch protections require pull requests for merging or restrict pushes to the target branch, you must first update the branch protection settings in your VCS in order for the Bypass pull requests automation setting to function properly. Learn more about changing these settings in GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.