Bamboo CI Plan Templates?

Question

Many of my project builds utilize the same stages, jobs and tasks over and over again. Is there any way to define a "template" plan and use it to make other templated plans from? I'm not talking about cloning, because with cloning, you are then able to make independent changes to all the clones.

What I want is a way to template, say, 10 different plans, and then if I want to add a new job/task to all of them, I would only need to change the template and that would ripple out into all the plans utilizing the template.

Is this possible, and if so, how?

Answer 1

That isn't currently possible, unfortunately:

A fairly old feature request for plan templates to reuse across projects (BAM-907) has been resolved as Fixed due to the introduction of plan branches in Bamboo 4.0 (see Using plan branches for details):

Plan Branches are a Bamboo Plan configuration that represent a branch in your version control system. They inherit all of the configuration defined by the parent Plan, except that instead of building against the repository's main line, they build against a specified branch. It is also worth noting that only users with edit access to the Plan can create Plan Branches that inherit from that plan.

While plan branches are a killer simplification for typical Git workflows around feature branches and pull requests indeed and might help accordingly, they neither fully cover the original request nor yours, presumably - that aspect is meanwhile tracked via Add possibility to create plan templates and choose a template when creating a plan (BAM-11380) and esp. Build and deployment templates (BAM-13600), with the latter featuring a somewhat promising comment from January 2014:

Thank you for reporting this issue. We've been thinking about templates a lot over the last few months. When we've got more news to share on this, we will be sure to update this ticket.