Pipelines

Pipelines are the top level containers for modelling and defining your workflows. Connecting pipelines to your source control allows you to run builds when your code changes. You can run anything with a Buildkite pipeline! 🚀

What is a pipeline?

A pipeline is a template of the steps you want to run. There are many types of steps, some run scripts, some define conditional logic, and others wait for user input. When you run a pipeline, a build is created. Each of the steps in the pipeline end up as jobs in the build, which then get distributed to available agents.

Is this only for running tests and deploying code?

Not at all! You can do all kinds of exciting things with pipelines, like generating static sites, running data imports, provisioning servers, and automating app store submissions. You can even use pipelines to create other pipelines 😱

Pipelines page walkthrough

Once you've set up a few pipelines and have run some builds, you can see an overview of them on the Pipelines page. Each pipeline has a set of metrics to give you an overview of its health and performance.

Pipeline status

A visual indication of your pipeline's current status. This icon is based on the latest build on your default branch.

Build history

The build history visualizes the last 30 builds that have been run on your default branch. The height of each bar reflects the build's running time, and its status is represented by its colour and in the tooltip on hover.

Speed

The speed of your pipeline is calculated from the average of your 30 most recent builds. This helps you keep an eye on your pipeline's speed, and compare performance between pipelines.

Reliability

The reliability of your pipeline is a calculation based on passing vs failing builds over the last 30 days. This metric helps you to understand the overall stability of your pipelines.

Builds per week

The builds per week measurement is calculated based on the average number of builds created over the past 4 weeks. This metric helps you to understand how frequently a pipeline is run.

Starring pipelines

You can keep your most used pipelines at the top of the page by clicking the star on the far right of any pipeline 🌟🔝

Filtering pipelines

You can filter pipelines using the search bar at the top of the page. This will search the titles of pipelines, and return all those matching your search terms.

If your organization has Teams enabled, you can also filter this page by the teams that you're in. When you have more than one team attached to your Buildkite account, you'll see a dropdown list of teams at the top of the pipelines page. This defaults to 'All Teams'. Selecting a specific team will filter the list of pipelines to display only those accessible by the selected team.

Customizing the page

Your pipeline's name, description, its repository, and your default branch are all editable. After you've clicked on a pipeline, the settings button is in the top right corner.

The display settings can be found in the Pipeline Settings section. Adding a description for your pipeline is optional, but name, repository, and default branch are all required. Descriptions also have full emoji support 🙌🦙💯

Pipeline page

Clicking through to a pipeline page shows the build history for that pipeline, your starred branches, and the ten most recently built branches for that pipeline.

Build page

Clicking through to a build page shows the full list of jobs and other steps in that build, the information about who triggered the build, and the controls for rebuilding or cancelling the build while it's in progress.

On the build page, you can also view All Builds, Edit Steps in the current build, open Pipeline Settings, or start a New Build.

You can expand the All Builds menu to view Recent, Running, Scheduled, or All Recent Builds.

Each job in a build has a footer that displays the job exit status, which provides more visibility into the outcome of each job. It helps you to diagnose failed builds by finding issues with agents and pipelines.

Job exit status may include the exit signal reason, which indicates whether the Buildkite agent stopped or the job was cancelled.

Exit status information available in the GraphQL API but not the REST API.