How-to: Toggle Dry-Run Mode

This section discusses how to turn dry-run mode on or off. The dry-run mode control is in the workflow controller. Currently it is not supported through the Helm chart values file, so it must be done by manually editing the Kubernetes deployment.

Specifically, you just need to add the environment variable below to the deployment. Make sure it is added to the workflow-controller container and not to anything else.

kubectl -n heimdall edit deploy heimdall-workflow-controller

To turn it on, add the APS_DRY_RUN environment variable to the list and set it to true:

- name: APS_DRY_RUN
- value: "true"

After turning it on, the pod will be restarted automatically. A log line like below will be printed out at the beginning of the pod logs.

2025-06-07 00:35:03.012 | INFO     | workflow_controller.cli:serve:197 - DRY_RUN mode is active

To turn it off, either remove it or set it to false.

If the workflow controller is not running in a Kubernetes pod but in a systemd service (i.e., legacy mode), the same environment variable approach works as well.