Today we're introducing a new "failing" build state for faster feedback 🏃‍♂️💨

We know it's frustrating when your build fails. But when it does, you want that information as soon as possible so you can get it green.

Now, as soon as a single job fails, the build can be marked as "failing". You'll see a GitHub Commit Status, or a Slack notification — whatever your team uses — as soon as we know your build is going to fail. And on the dashboard your build will show as failing. If you're using annotations or Test Analytics then your build can also tell you what to do to fix the problem while it's still finishing.

But fast feedback is only half of the equation. There's nothing worse than a build which takes forever just to tell you it's broken. If you're in a big team running lots of builds, running the rest of a failing build might be a waste of time. So we're also introducing "cancel on build failing."

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steps:
  - command: bundle && bin/rails spec
    parallelism: 100
    cancel_on_build_failing: true

Adding the cancel_on_build_failing: true attribute to your command steps will cause those jobs to be canceled as soon as a build becomes failing. That way your agents can move on to the next piece of work. But we'll still send failing notifications before cancelation is complete.

We realise that some folks might need to update API clients or adjust pipeline and workflows, so this new feature is being introduced as opt-in for a smooth migration path. But you can turn on failing builds right now by going to your pipeline on the Buildkite dashboard, then going to the Settings page, Builds, and enabling Fail Fast:

You can also turn this on for your whole organization on your org's Pipeline Settings page.

The buttons will go away and the feature will be enabled for everybody on Monday, 5th September, 2022.

If this does exactly what you need, or you have a suggestion, we'd love to hear from you in our community Slack channel, or drop us an email to support@buildkite.com.