Hi, coming tuesday we are going to deploy a big artifact (because of a major skim and because of the Pega upgrade 25). Now the deployment manager is warning that the artifact contain draft flows and that it will not be able to install it in production.
This is new behavior since Pega 25 and we are not sure if this really blocks the deployment. It is not possible to rebuild the artifact because currently it is being tested on staging / uat server.
Can we indeed install this artifact on production? And if not by pipeline then manually?
Draft mode is intended for incomplete case processes during development, and it must be turned off before production release. Pega flags draft flows as a guardrail violation for production readiness. If the artifact contains draft flows, it is recommended that you should treat it as a production-blocking issue unless those flows are removed or turned off before deployment. As you correctly stated, Pega’s Deployment Manager now explicitly checks for draft flows, and production-level deployments can be blocked when draft flows are present.
Having said that, you can manually install the artifact and bypass the pipeline.
However, even if you bypass the pipeline, the draft flows are still draft flows, so you risk deploying non-executable or unsupported process configuration into production.
You should ideally position this as something to fix before release, not something to bypass.
Even if the draft flows are not intended for production use, deployment manager may still block them because the deployment check is based on artifact content rather than business intent. I’d be opinionated here and the safe path according to me is to keep the draft flows in UAT/staging and remove them from the production package or move them to a separate non-production branch.
