Trigger pipelines from more GitHub events

Buildkite pipelines can now be triggered by a much broader set of GitHub webhook events — not just pushes and pull requests. This makes it easier to migrate GitHub Actions workflows to Buildkite incrementally, without losing triggers along the way.

New event triggers

You can now trigger pipeline builds from:

• Pull request reviews — run builds when a review is submitted or dismissed
• Check runs — react to completed check runs from other GitHub Apps, with built-in loop prevention for Buildkite's own checks
• Releases — trigger builds when a GitHub release is published, created, or released
• Issue comments — kick off builds from PR comments, with configurable command word filtering (supports exact and contains match modes)
• Pull request review comments — trigger builds from inline diff comments, with the same command word and match mode support (useful for AI assistant triggers like @claude)
• Deployment statuses — build when a deployment status changes
• Branch and tag creation — trigger on create events for new branches or tags

Expanded pull request actions

Pull request triggers now support additional actions beyond opened and synchronize:

Builds can now be triggered by edited, reopened, converted_to_draft, review_requested, and dequeued actions, in addition to the existing ready_for_review, labeled, and unlabeled actions.

Disable all webhooks

You can now disable all GitHub webhook-triggered builds for a pipeline with a single button. Select Disable GitHub Webhooks in your pipeline's GitHub settings to stop all webhook processing. Your existing trigger settings are preserved and restored when you re-enable.

Better filtering

GitHub webhook-triggered builds also now include BUILDKITE_GITHUB_EVENT and BUILDKITE_GITHUB_ACTION environment variables, available at runtime and in build.env() conditionals. These are also included as new conditional variables to make it easy to write fine-grained build filters:

• build.source_event — the GitHub event type (e.g. push, pull_request, release)
• build.source_action — the event action (e.g. labeled, opened, submitted)

We've also added build.pull_request.label, which allows for filtering on the specific label that was just added or removed, rather than the whole set of labels.

All the new events expose relevant context as environment variables via build.env() that you can use in pipeline and step conditionals. This allows for more fine-grained filtering before you start running builds and steps.

Learn more about configuring GitHub webhook triggers in our documentation.