Trigger a Drone CI build and promote to a higher environment
domain: docs.drone.io · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Generate a Drone user token from the Drone UI under Account Settings; use it in the 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN' header
To trigger a build, POST to 'https://DRONE_HOST/api/repos/{owner}/{repo}/builds' with a JSON body specifying 'branch' and optionally 'params' (map of string key-value pairs)
Retrieve the created build number from the response; monitor via GET '/api/repos/{owner}/{repo}/builds/{build}' checking 'status' for 'success', 'failure', or 'running'
To promote a build to another environment (e.g. staging to production), POST to '/api/repos/{owner}/{repo}/builds/{build}/promote' with query params 'target=production' and optional 'params'
Promotion creates a new build with the same commit and the specified target; the pipeline must define a 'trigger.target' condition to gate promotion-only steps
Known gotchas
Drone promotion is a separate build triggered from a successful prior build; the pipeline YAML must explicitly handle the 'promote' event using 'trigger: {event: [promote]}' or steps will be skipped
The Drone API token is user-scoped and has admin access to all repos the user can see; use a dedicated machine user account for automation to limit blast radius
Drone's OSS and Enterprise editions have API differences; some endpoints available in Enterprise (e.g. cron management) are absent in OSS
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