We’ve taken some steps to ensure that the Buildkite Agent is ready for upcoming Macs running on Apple Silicon. 👩🏻💻✨
First things first, we are eagerly anticipating Go, the language the Agent is written in, gaining the ability to build macOS binaries specifically for Apple Silicon, and plan to provide such binaries as soon as it’s feasible to do so.
Currently we suggest the 64-bit Intel amd64 binary, which happily runs under Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon. 🦾
For those already adventuring on early Apple Silicon Macs, we’ve verified that our Homebrew-based Mac installation instructions work just fine there. Our non-Homebrew and Linux install script has also been updated to ensure it picks the correct binary on Apple Silicon Macs.
Both of these installation options will install the 64-bit Intel binary, and while the Agent itself will run within Rosetta 2, running an Apple Silicon binary or test suite within your builds should work just fine. We don’t anticipate any obvious issues with this configuration, but please report any issues you do encounter to us.
We have also decided to stop providing 32-bit Intel 386 binaries for macOS as of the next Agent release. This is intended to avoid confusion due to the fact that neither current Macs running macOS Catalina nor upcoming Apple Silicon Macs can run them. For those curious, since early 2018, only the 64-bit Intel binaries have been supplied via our Homebrew formula. If you have a specific need for a 32-bit Intel Mac binary, building the Agent yourself will likely work for the foreseeable future.
To the Linux, BSD and Windows users out there; we have no plans to stop providing 32-bit Intel binaries for your platforms. ✌🏼
If you have any questions we haven’t covered here, or run into some issues in your continuing adventures, please let us know via support@buildkite.com.