How to Publish Pacts to a Pact Broker or PactFlow

Publishing sends each pact to the broker under a consumer version equal to the git sha so provider verification and can-i-deploy can find it.

Use pact-broker publish with --consumer-app-version set to the commit sha and --branch set to the current branch. The broker stores the contract and its version metadata.

Steps

• Set PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL and PACT_BROKER_TOKEN as CI secrets.
• Compute the short sha and current branch.
• Run pact-broker publish ./pacts with --consumer-app-version and --branch.

Publish step

      - name: Publish pacts
        env:
          PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL: ${{ vars.PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL }}
          PACT_BROKER_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PACT_BROKER_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          npx pact-broker publish ./pacts \
            --consumer-app-version "${GITHUB_SHA}" \
            --branch "${GITHUB_REF_NAME}"

Gotchas

• Always version by an immutable identifier like the git sha, never a static string, or can-i-deploy cannot distinguish releases.
• Publishing the same version twice is idempotent as long as the content matches.

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