Version control in Automation 360

Version control helps you to manage the changes that you make to files that include Task Bots, documents, reports, scripts, executable files, and workflows. With version control, you can track and monitor changes to your bot logic.

With version control, you can identify the version of a bot that you want to modify and compare your recent changes against the changes made to the bot previously. As a Control Room admin, you can configure version control in the Control Room settings.

Automation 360 includes version control capabilities, and you can use these capabilities irrespective of whether you have integrated your Control Room with Git. Review the capabilities available in Automation 360 and Git.


Version control in Automation 360 and Git

Version control in Automation 360

  • Check out and check in Task Bots: You can check out one version of a bot (version 1) from public to your private workspace, make changes to it, and then check in the bot to the public workspace. This creates a new version (version 2) of the bot, which is the latest version. Every time you check out, make changes to, and check in a bot, a new version of the bot is created as the latest version.
    Note: You can run either the latest version of a bot or the version that has the production label.

    You can roll back to a particular version of a bot by selecting Advanced options in the check out action to select a specific version of the bot to check out. Also, you can select the dependencies to check out. By doing this, you can make changes to a specific version of a bot and its dependencies. When you check in this bot, it becomes the latest version. For example, if the latest version of a bot is version 8 and you want to roll back to version 3, you must first check out version 3 of the bot and then check it back in, which creates version 9. This latest version, which is identical to version 3, is now available in the public workspace for bot operations.

    Check in a bot | Check out a single bot

  • Label Task Bot : You can also roll back to a specific version of a bot by assigning a label to that version of the bot. You can use this label to choose the version with which you want to perform certain bot operations. With the version of your choice, you can schedule, run, queue, export, and trigger bot development workflows.

    Assign label to a bot

  • View Task Bot history: You can view the version history of your Task Bots in the public workspace. With View history, you can view the history of changes that have occurred in your Task Bots and identify the actions performed by a user. The list of all the versions of a bot is shown in reverse chronological order. The information displayed includes version number, check-in message, date and time of check-in, and the name of the user who checked in the version.

    View Task Bot version history

  • Compare versions: You can compare any two versions of your Task Bots to view the differences between those two versions.

    Compare bot versions

  • Restore bots from Git: Even if your Control Room is not integrated with Git, you can restore bots from Git to your public workspace. For example, if you have 50 bots in your public workspace and 75 bots in Git, you can restore the remaining 25 bots from Git to your public workspace.
    Note: This restore option is available only for On-Premises deployments and not supported on Cloud deployments.

Version control with Git

If your Control Room is integrated with Git, all the versions of the bots and files in Automation 360 are synced with Git, and you can use the following additional capabilities:
  • Integrate with a Git branch.
  • Integrate with Git through SSH authentication.
  • Integrate with Git through a proxy server.
  • Restore bots or files to an empty public repository from an existing Git configuration.
  • Configure force push when connecting to Git.

Integrating Control Room with Git repositories