Buildkite Changelog

Build Matrix has been extended to support matrix variable interpolation inside the plugins and agents attributes of command steps.

steps:
- label: "💥 Matrix Build"
  command: "echo {{matrix.os}} {{matrix.arch}}"
  agents:
    queue: "builder-{{matrix.arch}}"
  matrix:
    setup:
      arch:
        - "amd64"
        - "arm64"
      os:
        - "windows"
        - "linux"
  plugins:
    - artifacts#v1.9.0:
        upload: "out/{{matrix.arch}}.gz"

Learn more about increased Build Matrix support

The waterfall view visualizes the timeline of each step in a build. You can see this summary in your Builds page a toggle–enabling to switch between list and waterfall views.

Quickly view insights about failed tests by going directly from a job to its related information in Test Analytics – providing a faster path from fail to fix.

Flaky tests are automated tests that produce inconsistent or unreliable results, despite being run on the same code and environment. They cause frustration, decrease confidence in testing, and waste time while you investigate whether the failure is due to a genuine bug.

Test Analytics finds your flakes by surfacing when the same test is run multiple times on the same commit SHA with different results. The tests might run multiple times within a single build or across different builds. Either way, they are detected as flaky if they report both passed and failed results.

Results are available in the Test Analytics UI and via a new REST API endpoint.

Learn more about flaky test tracker and its API

Pipeline tags make it easier to sort through and filter multiple pipelines. Tag names support both text and emojis. You can now tag your pipelines and use the search bar to find tags.

Tags are unique per pipeline, don't contain line breaks and are capped at 64 characters. You can have 5 tags per pipeline.

Tags can also be set through REST and GraphQL APIs.

To set the tags, go to Pipeline Settings > General > Tags

Analyze your usage by pipeline or test suite, with the option to view monthly or daily breakdowns. Delve into previous billing periods, and conveniently export your data for offline analysis.

Learn more about usage breakdown

We've added a glossary to highlight and explain the core concepts of pipelines.

See Pipelines glossary to check it out. ✨

We’ve added a guide to help you set up merge queues in your pipelines. Merge queues are a feature of GitHub to improve development velocity on busy branches. ✨

See Using GitHub merge queues to learn more. 📚

Job logs now have the addition of light theme on build summaries – ensuring those that find lower contrast easy-to-read have an alternative option.

Unblocking engineers - and your work – is the core theme of how we think of everything here at Buildkite, including usability. The new light theme was inspired by Ethan Schoonover's Solarized theme. Now, when you open a job log, you’ll see a new “Theme” control – enabling you to switch between our current dark mode theme and the new light theme. Your preference will be saved for future views, with the option for you to switch views.

As always, we'd love your feedback. Drop into our Slack community, or send us an email: hello@buildkite.com 👋

Today we’re introducing the ability to configure multiple GitHub Enterprise Servers.

Some of our bigger teams with different requirements for source control have multiple GitHub Enterprise Server installations. We’ve only supported one per Buildkite organization — until now. If you’re on a compatible plan, you can now add as many different servers as you like from the repository providers page in your organization settings.

We love feedback! If you use this feature and love it, or it doesn’t quite do what you need, drop into our Slack community, or send us an email: hello@buildkite.com 👋

Failed builds now jump straight to a new Issues tab on the build page 🗂

Builds with hundreds of jobs can hide what really matters. Instead of scrolling through the noise, Issues shows you only the failed annotations and jobs in a build. This helps you get your code shipping faster. And the rest of your jobs are only a tab click away.

Check out the blog post to learn more about this change.

As always, we'd love your feedback. Drop into our Slack community, or say hi: hello@buildkite.com 👋

Update, Sep 2023: We are no longer offering per pipeline build retention. For more information on retention per plan, see check out the docs.

Today, we're introducing build retention controls for pipelines so you can automatically remove old builds ⏰🧨

You can now configure pipelines to keep builds for a certain period of time. There's also an option to always keep a minimum number of the latest builds, so you don't lose context on pipelines that don't move quite so fast. These are available today — find any pipeline, then go to Settings, Builds, and look for the Build Retention section.

This change is currently optional, but we'll be announcing a broader rollout for build retention soon.

We'd love to hear from you if you find these controls useful, or if they don't quite fit your needs first. Drop into our Slack community, or send us an email: hello@buildkite.com 👋

We've released a new schema browser for our GraphQL API 🎉

You can now easily browse the entire structure of the API right there in the docs, without needing to log in first

You can now specify default timeouts for command steps ⏰💥

Timeouts can be specified on command steps already, but it's a pain to have to do it every time, and easy to forget. Setting default timeouts means you won't have command steps slip through the cracks and accidentally run forever, or consume too many job minutes.

Default and maximum timeouts can be specified at an organization and pipeline level. Defaults apply in order of specificity — the step's timeout will be used if supplied, otherwise it defaults to the pipeline's default if supplied, or finally to the organization. Maximums are always enforced, when supplied — the smallest value will be used.

These timeouts can be configured from your organization's Pipeline Settings page, or on a pipeline's Builds settings page.

We'd love to hear from you if you find these timeouts useful, or if they don't quite fit your needs first. Drop into our Slack community, or send us an email: hello@buildkite.com 👋

For customers triggering builds via GitHub, we've added a new environment variable to track the draft status of a pull request:

BUILDKITE_PULL_REQUEST_DRAFT="true"

If a pull request triggers a build while in a draft state, this variable will be present in all the build's command jobs. The variable will be absent otherwise.

This variable allows customizing your uploaded pipelines or running jobs at the agent level based on a pull request's draft status. For example, you might run a faster subset of your tests while a pull request is still in a draft state.

Check out our docs on environment variables for more information.

If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear from you in our community Slack channel, or drop us an email to support@buildkite.com.

We know how frustrating finding and fixing flaky tests can be. And how costly your test suite performance degradations can become over time. We’ve been working to solve these problems for good, with our newest product — Buildkite Test Analytics.

As of today, Test Analytics is out of beta and available to everyone 🎉

• Automatically identify flaky tests, see what is causing the most disruption for your team, and get a head-start on fixing them for good.
• Get deep visibility and tracing for your test suite, integrated with your programming language and test framework.
• Set targets and identify problems as soon as they occur with configurable speed and reliability monitors.

Test Analytics is included in all Buildkite plans and is free to get started. You can even use it with any CI system, including GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Jenkins ⚡️

Read more on the website, in our documentation — and if you're super excited, retweet!

We've added Build Matrix so you can create multiple jobs from a single, multi-variant step definition. 🧮

Build Matrices can also include multiple dimensions, different combinations with the adjustments key, and matrix jobs can be grouped together to clean up build pages. ⚡️

Read more about it in the blog, documentation, or on Twitter.

We've added a new group pipeline step type so you can group steps together, set dependencies between them, reduce YAML repetition, and clean up your build pages 🏗✨

You can read more about it in the blog post, documentation, or on Twitter.

For teams using Datadog, we've recently made it easier to send information about your Buildkite pipelines to Datadog’s Continuous Integration Visibility. This is a simple integration that any organization using both Datadog and Buildkite can enable to get insights into their pipeline’s performance over time. 📈

For more details on the integration check out the documentation 📚

For teams that run Buildkite Pipelines and build Xcode based software projects for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS apps, you can now run your Buildkite Builds on AWS EC2 Mac instances using a CloudFormation template. 🎉

This experimental template creates an Auto Scaling group, launch template, and host resource group to launch a pool of EC2 Mac instances that run the Buildkite Agent.

📣 Big shoutout to Buildkite customer Oliver Koo for his early input into this feature 🙏

📚 For details on how to prepare and deploy this template to your AWS Account, checkout the Auto Scaling EC2 Mac documentation, or jump straight into Elastic CI Stack for EC2 Mac.