Buildkite Blog

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Determinate Systems are working to make Nix easier for everyone, and part of their mission is to make it as easy to use on macOS as Linux. Learn more about their work, their CI needs, and how they've architected their macOS builds.

As we expand our product footprint, including adding to Pipelines and Test Analytics, and looking to the future, it's become important to make some visual changes to unify the Buildkite experience.

GitHub recently announced the public beta of their much-anticipated pull request merge queue. In this post, you'll learn how to use it in your Buildkite pipelines.

Unblock '22 — A quick look back + links to all the Talk videos

A CI/CD pipeline is a powerful workflow for releasing software updates quickly and precisely–though sometimes, you need more than a static, one-size-fits-all approach. This article will cover dynamic pipelines, and how to create them easily.

We just returned from Singapore, where the climate was perfect, and the DevOps Talks inspirational.

We raised $21 million to invent the future of DevOps together.

We’re excited to share that Buildkite has achieved SOC 2 Type I compliance.

I just got back from Euruko, Europe's Ruby Conference. Helsinki played host to 700 Rubyists from all across the world for 2 days of incredible talks, and surprisingly amazing coffee!

Reduce repetitive manual tasks, and move away from "click-ops" by managing your Buildkite CI/CD resources as code using HashiCorp's Terraform.

Lelia Bray-Musso and Gary White Jr. are members of Wayfair’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) team. At last year’s Unblock conference, they shared how they upleveled their approach to CI with Buildkite, moving from an unstable and difficult to manage set of tools to a resilient and fun to use platform.

Buildkite is now available on AWS Marketplace

A behind-the-scenes look at the new build header design and some of the decisions, testing and iteration that made it a reality. Plus a peek at some upcoming changes coming to all Pipelines soon.

Jenkins has been a standard CI/CD choice for DevOps teams for years, but it's quickly becoming legacy technology for many teams. There are now more customizable and user-friendly solutions on the market with more responsive user interfaces, hybrid capabilities, and uncomplicated scaling.

A step-by-step guide to fixing flaky tests early and often.

Find out how to deal with flaky tests and use Buildkite’s Test Analytics to easily identify and fix them once and for all

We recently spoke with Shray from Bluecore about their migration from a cloud-based CI/CD provider to moving all of their pipelines to Buildkite, hosted on their Google Cloud infrastructure.

After 8 years as co-founder, Tim Lucas is leaving Buildkite

Learn how the Bazel team built their CI system on top of Buildkite, pick up some Bazel tips and best practices to speed up builds and manage pipelines at scale.

If someone said to you “we don’t monitor our code in production”, you’d think they were stuck in 2004. In 2022 there are hundreds of tools that help you monitor and analyze how your application is performing once it reaches customers.

As a platform being used in the software development cycle of thousands of companies around the world, Buildkite takes very seriously the reliability of our services. This article reflects on some of the changes we are doing to improve what we consider our Feature Number One: Reliability

Introducing Buildkite’s new Free plan, providing free access to the same ultra-fast CI/CD pipeline tools used by Shopify, Pinterest, PagerDuty, and Wix.

Today we're introducing new plans that pave the way for some upcoming releases, and that ensure we can continue to support and scale the highest performing CI/CD platform in a sustainable way

Lyft's Keith Smiley recently shared with us Lyft’s CI journey to Buildkite, their current setup based on Buildkite and Bazel, and where the team is heading next.

How we recently created the first version of our product design principles at Buildkite

Discover the 6 challenges Wix’s infrastructure team met head on during their quest to support a growing engineering team.

Reduce boilerplate, duplication and time spent managing potentially unnecessary separate pipelines and builds. The new Build Matrix feature enables the creation of multiple jobs from a single, multi-variant step definition.

Thinking about gender equality and a sustainable tomorrow.

We shuttered the store eighteen months ago (thanks COVID 🦠) but today, we are re-launching it 🎉🎉

The new Elastic CI Stack for EC2 Mac helps your team migrate mobile workloads from on-premise Mac hardware to AWS-managed servers for increased reliability, security, and speed 📱

We've introduced a new step type, giving teams with complex pipelines a way to group steps to simplify the visual appearance of builds.

Learn about the evolution of Pinterest's iOS build pipelines from on-prem hardware to autoscaling build queues backed by AWS EC2 Mac.

At Buildkite, we have just finished going through the process of reevaluating our values. Last year, we took a look at them and decided that they just didn’t quite feel right anymore. Why?

We caught up with the team at the Epidemiological Modelling Unit at Monash University's School of Publich Health and Preventitive Medicine to discuss

5 technical presentations, 9 deep dive technical webinars, 2 product keynotes, and all with a sprinkling of fun. See what happened at UnblockConf  ‘21.

Buildkite is now an official AWS Graviton Ready Partner 🎉 Full support for Graviton2 (C6g) instances is available now in the Elastic CI Stack for AWS, with Graviton3 (C7g) support coming soon.

Announcing our inaugural 3 day developer conference for teams implementing CI/CD at scale.

Identify problems in your delivery pipelines earlier than ever, understand what’s slowing down your builds, and set speed and reliability targets for your team.

Elotl’s Nodeless Kubernetes enables you to automate compute capacity management for workloads running on Kubernetes, including CI workloads like builds executed via Buildkite. We take a look at how, from a platform engineer's perspective.

Buildkite now integrates with PagerDuty Change Events, giving incident responders immediate access to recent build and deployment information.

Justin from Up shares their recent adventures in Android native build optimisations, improving their speed and stability using parallelism and GCP.

We're very excited to be part of the Mobile Native Foundation and what they're seeking to achieve within their burgeoning community.

I recently attended the PagerDuty summit, the standout session was a chat between Christine Yen (Honeycomb) and Armon Dadgar (Hashicorp), discussing their thoughts around what priorities are driving innovation in the DevOps space.

Let’s take a dive into three of the most common avenues that lead to security breaches and discuss ways to keep sensitive information safe.

After 4 years of using Buildkite as an engineer, I've joined as the first Developer Advocate. Here's a bit about me and how I got here, what it's been like a month in, and a chance to say hi.

Interviewing for a new role can be nerve-wracking. At Buildkite, we’ve designed our hiring process to give you the best opportunity to demonstrate your skills in a comfortable, remote setting.

Our most recent release in the Buildkite Agent includes a community member-submitted integration with Datadog APM. We’ve been looking forward to sharing this feature because it provides a lot of insight into your CI/CD process.

The ability to cancel builds as soon as possible provides developers with a quicker feedback loop, saving time and reducing the cost of running agents.

Intellyx CMO and Principal analyst Jason English, outlines some of the benefits and drawbacks of various CI strategies in the cloud.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve published an official Buildkite provider to the Terraform registry!

Migrating our largest table's primary key from an integer to a bigint with zero downtime.

We're launching a newsletter! Get up to date on the latest and greatest updates at Buildkite, delivered directly to your inbox in a convenient digest.

Have you found yourself with broken code in production, accidentally deleted data, or users with access too broad for their role? We'll show you how to secure your pipelines from yourself with Buildkite.

Practical guidance on using Buildkite to run ARM-based workloads in Apple Silicon and AWS Graviton environments.

Buildkite's seven values (transparency, quality, diversity, independence, empathy, collaboration, and sustainable growth) drive the benefits we offer Buildkiters. This post explores the "why" behind what we offer.

The early results are in, and it looks like Apple’s new lineup of M1 Macs are living up to the promise of higher performance using less power.

We are excited to announce an early access program for our macOS agents managed service, providing the first scalable CI platform for Mac and iOS development.

Announcing a range of features that deepen the integration between Buildkite and GitHub, simplifying the path for running fast, secure, and scalable pipelines.

Concurrency gates allow many of our customers — often bigger organizations with really large builds — to run multiple pipelines while stopping other tasks happening outside of that context until those things are finished.

Making the Buildkite docs more inclusive using automatic tests run on Buildkite 🛠 These linters won't fix your docs for you, but they will tell you where to fix them yourself

Our customers have often said to us that we’re the best-kept secret in the DevOps space. While humbling, being a best-kept secret is something we consider to be more of a bug than a feature 😀

Starting today, you can now grab yourself a screen printed Buildkite tee or vinyl sticker from our new online store. We can’t wait to start shipping you some stickers and tees. Head to shop.buildkite.com and order yourself some 💥

Buildkite’s Build Annotations let you add your own info to the top of build pages and notification emails using the buildkite-agent annotate sub-command. Generate and display coverage information, embed screenshots of test failures, visualize your dependency packages, link to a deployment, or point people to a file you’ve uploaded somewhere—the sky’s the limit 🌌

The Buildkite Agent is one of the most important pieces of Buildkite—it runs on your machine and infrastructure, and allows you to massively scale your builds whilst keeping control of performance and security. After two years of development and testing (and forty three betas!) we’re proud to announce that Buildkite Agent v3 has now been released as stable. ✨🚀

We’ve recently introduced some improvements to Job Retries. We’ve added some new attributes to our pipeline.yml command steps for automatically retrying failed jobs under certain conditions.

After much wrangling of HTML, browsers, words, and illustrations we’re excited to share an all-new website on buildkite.com 🎉 We’ve added a bunch of new pages, all jam-packed with information about Buildkite.

When running large fleets of build workers, you can sometimes run into consistent problems on a particular machine. To make it easier to detect and debug these problems, we’ve updated the Agent page and GraphQL API to provide a history of jobs the Agent has executed. 🕵🏻‍♀️📒

All my teammates are always excited about writing blog posts, but end up without any spare work time to do them. Hearing them say on multiple occasions they’d love to have some time for writing inspired me to try something a little different — a hack week, but with everyone entirely focused on writing 🎉

Once again, the time has come to update some of the most critical of Buildkite’s infrastructure — our emoji support! ✨ Unicode 9.0 has landed, and shortly afterwards, 🏳️‍🌈 Emoji 4.0, each bringing with them a multitude new emoji and more opportunities to express yourself.

In this post I’ll show you how to setup your Maven project with Buildkite and packagecloud. Download the example Maven project from GitHub to follow along on your own machine: https://github.com/computology/buildkite-maven-project.

We’ve just released a new permissions system for Buildkite, allowing you to control exactly who gets access to which pipelines in your organization 🙅🏼🔐

Flakey tests are the worst. Sometimes when debugging flakey tests, we (the Buildkite development team) would say things like “wouldn’t it be cool if the test suite did this” or “I’d be able to debug this failure so much easier if I just had access to the database”. So we tried to build some of those things, and turns out, it wasn’t as hard as we thought it’d be.

To compliment the recently reorganized pipeline settings, we’ve rolled out upgrades to the pipeline header. It includes a quick link to your source code, works better on smaller screens, and has even stronger emoji support. 🎉

To make it easier to manage your Buildkite pipelines, we’ve just rolled out completely reorganized Pipeline Settings. There’s now a navigation sidebar, easier to find source control settings and setup instructions, and the ability to manage scheduled builds. ♻️ ⚙️ 🎉

For a long while, I’ve admired programming languages which attempt to emulate the natural languages they’re derived from. I’m often seeking more natural ways to express concepts in programming.

There’s a new way to interact with your Buildkite builds 😯 Instead of sifting through the builds from everyone in your organisation to find the ones you’ve started, we’ve collected them for you all in one place: My Builds.

Running a Secret Santa takes a lot of work! Firstly you create a spreadsheet with everyone’s names so they can add their Christmas gift hints, and for a remote team like ours, a delivery address too. 📊 Then you allocate each person their “Secret Santa” by pulling names out of a hat, wait for everyone to finish filling out the spreadsheet, and after much poking and fussing, notify each person to tell them who they’re buying for — all this whilst making sure everything stays a secret. 🙈

Getting data into pipelines can be hard. Instead of wrangling APIs and chatops, you can now add custom forms directly to your Buildkite pipelines 🙌🏻 Getting input from your team has never been easier.

Our new Pipelines page highlights what we care about most — helping you make your builds fast and reliable. Doing a ground-up rebuild of the Pipelines page was an excellent opportunity for us to add features in answer to a whole lot of common requests. Each pipeline focuses on its default branch, helping you keep an eye on your team’s most important statistics.

We've been evolving Buildkite's infrastructure pretty rapidly of late. In a very short period of time we've moved from some handcrafted snowflake servers doing everything to a fully autoscaling cluster of machines segmented by workload. To achieve this agility we've embraced configuration as code using Terraform and Packer, coupled with a collaborative workflow using GitHub and Buildkite.

On the 22nd of August 2016 at 17:21 UTC, Buildkite suffered a severe unplanned outage. During this period Buildkite was still able to run builds and update GitHub/Bitbucket Pull Request statuses, but no one was able to login, view build logs or read documentation. This is a full account of what happened, what changes we’ve made and lessons we learned.

GraphQL is a new standard for defining, querying and documenting APIs in a human-friendly way, with built-in documentation, a friendly query language and a bunch of tools to help you get started ⚡️

We’ve been wanting to rework how you invite people to your Buildkite organization for quite a while, so I’m happy to share that we’ve just shipped two big changes to the invite process: invitation emails for everyone ✉️ and automatic verification 🔐

We wanted to make it easier for any team to setup their build stack on AWS, so working with some of our best customers (👋 99designs) we’ve created the Elastic CI Stack for AWS: a pre-built CI and CD stack that gives you an autoscaling build cluster in your own AWS VPC.

See the pass/fail status of your pull request builds with Bitbucket’s shiny new pull request statuses ✔ Whenever you create or update a pull request in Bitbucket, you’ll now see a live updating status of both your Buildkite build, and each individual step in your build pipeline, directly on the Bitbucket pull request page.

Receive real-time notifications of changes to your agents, builds and jobs with new webhook events and filtering options ⚡️ Webhooks allow you to extend and customize Buildkite to suit your team’s needs, and along with the 2.0 agent release we’ve given the Buildkite webhook system a major overhaul.

The Buildkite Agent is an open source tool for securely running build and automation tasks on your own infrastructure. And after 41 betas and almost a year in development, I’m excited to announce that v2 of the agent has finally hit stable! Thanks so much to everyone who tested, contributed, and filed issues during the v2 betas. We couldn’t have done it without you ❤️

You can now easily use the GitHub Deployments API to trigger your Buildkite deployment pipelines 🚀 The GitHub Deployments API is designed to be used with your own deployment tool (such as hubot-deploy) and supports options such as `required_contexts` to validate that other services and Buildkite pipelines must have succeeded on a commit before allowing a deploy.

You can now embed failure screenshots, performance graphs and even animated gifs directly in your Buildkite build logs. Since the first release of Terminal (our open source, screen-emulating log renderer) we've dreamed of adding support for inline images so you could quickly and precisely see what went wrong without you having to dig through your build artifacts and logs.

Have separate GitHub commit statuses for every step in your build pipeline, with live updates and direct links to their logs. GitHub recently launched the ability to view all the build statuses for a pull request, for example you can now easily see the result of your Code Climate code quality checks alongside your Buildkite tests 🔴 ☑️

No longer does your team’s build monitor have to miss out on all the fun ✨ and 🐼 bears that you get in the Buildkite web interface, as we’ve now added a simple Emojis API.

You can now create and manage multiple API access tokens, and scope them specific accounts and projects We’ve just added a new API Access Tokens section to your Buildkite user settings to help you manage API access 🚪 and security 🔐. You can now create new tokens as you need (each with their own limited set of permissions) as well as audit which tokens are currently being used and by whom.

Today we’re shipping big improvements to how you manage all of your 📣 and 🔔. You can now add multiple notification services across your entire organization (for example, different Slack channels for each team and project).

It seems like only yesterday we launched this new site along with a shiny new logo. On top of shipping the recent navigation changes, pipeline improvements and Slack notifications, and working on the upcoming elastic build agents, we’ve also been working on something much bigger. From today onwards we have a new name: Buildkite.

You may have noticed that things are looking ✨ around here, and it’s not just because it’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere 🌻 Today we’re excited to announce some big changes we’ve been working our hardest on: a new identity, new pricing, a new site, and new elastic build agents.

GitLab is an open source tool for hosting and collaborating on Git repositories on your own servers. And today, we're excited to announce official Buildbox support for GitLab projects 🎉

Earlier today serious vulnerabilities in bash were discovered. CVE-2014-6271, aka Shellshock or "Bash Bug", which allow arbitrary code execution using specially-crafted environment variables. You can read more about it at Wikipedia.

You can now choose a Slack message theme with a little more ✨ 🐧 ✨ with the new Message theme option in your Slack notification settings (Account Settings → Notifications → Slack).

Today we’re announcing two new project-related features: 🐝 project environment variables, and the much anticipated 🐼 build status badges.

✨ Amazing news! We’re excited to announce that Tim Lucas has joined us as co-founder of Buildbox. Tim will be working on all things product, design, and marketing, and has already developed a new identity for us that we’ll be announcing soon.

Today we're shipping some updates to the build log output renderer as well as releasing a new version of the terminal gem (v0.3.2). The updates include: enhanced rendering of npm output, basic support for background colors, unicode emoji, and ANSI Art.

A few months ago we released a new version of the Buildbox Agent that was rewritten entirely in Golang. Today we’re releasing version 0.2 of the agent, composed of almost 100 commits with some exciting new features.

Today, we're open sourcing Terminal, the Ruby library behind our rendering of job logs. Terminal makes it easy to take arbitrary shell output, and turn it into beautifully rendered HTML. It has a simple API…

We're excited to ship some new UI updates to Buildbox. The updates include: a redesigned projects list view, a redesigned project header, an improved navigation bar design, those pages now update in realtime when new builds are triggered, and emojis now work everywhere!

We've just revamped our documentation! You can check it out by going to https://buildkite.com/docs. There is also a brand new Getting Started guide, to help you get setup with your new Buildbox account.

Today, Buildbox is back with a brand new invention. I'm happy to introduce you to Build Pipelines. These allow you to take your build, split it up into smaller steps and parallelize them over multiple build agents. This can result in major speed improvements to your builds.

TLDR: There is a new version of the agent written in Golang. Learn how to upgrade from the Ruby agent and install it from scratch at https://github.com/buildbox/agent.

If you use your personal git config when contributing to work projects then today's feature might interest you. When we complete a build for any branch that isn't starred, by default we'll send an email to the address associated with the author of the most recent commit.

You can now access the status of your builds using the Multiple Project Summary Reporting Standard, which is commonly known as cctray.xml or cc.xml What is this "Multiple Project Summary Reporting Standard" you ask? Well...I'm glad you asked.

We've just finished rolling out a brand new version of the branches page. The new design will let you peek at what builds are currently running for every branch. You can use the star button on the right to have certain branches (like master) stick to the top of the list.

If you have a long running build open in another tab on your browser, it's nice to know when that build finishes. We've now made it a little more easier to know when its status changes.

Some code changes don't really require a full build - editing documentation for example. If you want Buildbox to ignore a commit and not build it, simply add [ci skip] somewhere in the commit message. Buildbox will won't build this commit or store it in the history.

You can now upload files associated with any build you run on Buildbox. This is useful if you generate documentation or code coverage analysis for your projects. You define which artifacts you want to upload by specifying a directory glob on your Pipeline Setings page.

We have some very exciting news for you... Not only are we launching a shiny new blog for Buildbox, but we're happy to announce that we're out of Beta! You can now signup without having to wait for an invite. Pricing information is also available.