Changelog

Introducing early access to Buildkiteโ€™s Managed macOS CI

Update, June 2021: We are no longer offering Buildkite-hosted macOS agents. Forย more information on spinning up your own Buildkite agents on macOS, see this guide from Stark and Wayne or check out the docs.

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We are excited to announce an exclusive program for our macOS agents managed service, providing the first scalable CI platform for Mac and iOS development ๐Ÿš€

To learn more and to resister your interest, check out our introduction to Hosted Mac Agents and our blog post about the announcement ๐Ÿ“šโœจ

Keith

Copy environment variables to clipboard

Those occasional times when you need to grab a copy of all the environment variables on a job, wouldn't it be great if there was a button for that? ๐Ÿค”

Screen Shot 2020-10-29 at 4.36.26 pm.png

Now there is! We've added a button to the job Environment tab to copy all of your environment variables and their values straight into your clipboard ๐Ÿš€

Shevaun

Apple Silicon support in the Buildkite Agent

Apple machines with the new ARM-based M1 chip are being delivered to Buildkite customers, and starting from agent 3.26.0 we have an experimental binary that will run natively on these systems.

Users with M1 based hardware can install the native binary by:

apple-silicon-agent.png

James

Archive Pipelines ๐Ÿ—ƒ

If you manage a lot of pipelines you will be pleased to hear that we've added the ability to archive pipelines that are no longer in use. Archived pipelines have all their historical data preserved, but won't run new builds, and are not shown on the Pipelines page by default. You'll find a list of archived pipelines in the Team Selector:

View archived pipelines.png

Archive pipelines from the Settings page, under Pipeline Management, or using the GraphQL API.

Archive Pipelines.png

Happy Archiving!

Juanito

GraphQL resource id is available on the REST API

As part of the transition to GraphQL, we have added graphql_id for the following REST API resources. The graphql_id is used to target specific resources when running queries and mutations on GraphQL API.

  • Agent
  • Build
  • Job
  • Organization
  • Pipeline
  • Team
  • User

Here is an example response from pipelines which includes graphql_id:

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{
  "id": "849411f9-9e6d-4739-a0d8-e247088e9b52",
  "graphql_id": "UGlwZWxpbmUtLS1lOTM4ZGQxYy03MDgwLTQ4ZmQtOGQyMC0yNmQ4M2E0ZjNkNDg=",
  "url": "https://api.buildkite.com/v2/organizations/acme-inc/pipelines/my-pipeline"
}

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know in the Forum or send us an email ๐Ÿ“จ

Juanito

Quickly toggle UTC times on Buildkite

Establishing a shared timeline when troubleshooting or digging into recent builds can be a challenge, especially for distributed teams. To help make this a little easier, weโ€™ve added the ability to toggle between local time and UTC by clicking on a timestamp โฑ

timestamp-toggle-small.gif

As an added bonus, UTC times include the full date and are shown in 24-hour time regardless of your browserโ€™s default locale settings โœจ

Jessica

Webhooks can be auto-created for GitHub repositories

We've updated our GitHub app, adding the option to automatically create webhooks for new pipelines ๐Ÿ”€

Screen Shot 2020-11-23 at 9.57.23 am.png

The Buildkite GitHub App now additionally requests the webhook read & write permission for Repositories. We'll only use this permission to create new webhooks when you explicitly check the 'Auto-create webhooks' box during pipeline setup ๐Ÿ”

Eleanor

Share git checkouts with the git-mirrors Agent experiment

Teams with large repositories, we'd love for you to try out the git-mirrors experiment flag, available on all agents v3.10.0 and above. This enables you to have a single git clone per host, to help speed up git operations and reduce network and disk usage ๐Ÿ‘ฏ

git-mirrors.png

You can get started using git mirrors by setting the git-clone-mirror-flags experimental agent config option.

Let us know about any questions or issues on the Shared Git Checkouts topic in the Buildkite Community Forum ๐Ÿ“

Harriet

Custom states for blocked builds

With the new block step attribute, blocked_state, you can specify what state the build should have when itโ€™s blocked by each block step โ€” green passed, yellow running, or red failed.

Screen Shot 2020-09-30 at 10.37.54 am.png

When youโ€™ve got a block step that requires user input, having the build look or behave like it's passed isnโ€™t always what you want. Setting blocked_state will affect the build state within the Buildkite UI, source provider integrations, webhooks, and notifications. This gives you more control over how your builds interact with PRs and custom integrations.

Add the new blocked_state attribute to your block steps to change the blocked status colour from the default green.

Grant

Branch filter pattern changes

You can now mix positive and negative branch filter patterns for more precise control over which branches to build ๐Ÿ”€

Branch filter pattern example: main features/* features/beta

We've done our best to reach out via email if your pipeline already had a mix of patterns that will be affected by this change ๐Ÿ‘‹๐Ÿป

If you're seeing unexpected builds, or are left waiting for a build that isn't showing up, we'd suggest a quick review of your pipeline's branch filter patterns.

For more information on branch filter patterns and some example code, check out the updated branch configuration docs.

Samuel

Elastic CI Stack for AWS v5.0.0

We've released a new major version of the Elastic CI Stack ๐ŸŒˆ

The latest version includes:

  • Experimental Windows Server 2019 support
  • Support for four new regions: ap-east-1 (Hong Kong), me-south-1 (Bahrain), af-south-1 (Cape Town), eu-south-1 (Milan)
  • Support for managing Agent tokens with AWS SSM
  • A blazing fast Agent Auto Scaler by AWS Lambda - up to 300% faster initial scale-ups compares to previous AutoScaling rules

And much, much more! Check out the full changelog for this release on GitHub.

We'd love for you to share any feedback you have on the v5 announcement post in our forum ๐Ÿค“

Thank you to the many users who provided bug reports and contributions that made this release possible ๐Ÿ’š

Juanito

An all new Timeline tab

Debugging job and agent issues has become a whole lot easier with the shiny updates we've just released to the Timeline tab ๐Ÿ“–

timeline-tab.gif

The new and improved Timeline tab has:

  • Live updating with agent events
  • Events from the dispatcher showing when the jobs are scheduled and assigned, and
  • All your job info in one place including concurrency groups, step dependencies, and conditionals

You can find all of these updates under the Timeline tab of any job ๐Ÿ•ต๐Ÿปโ€โ™€๏ธ

Jessica

GitHub App integration

See exactly which repo permissions are requested by Buildkite with our new GitHub App :github:

Installing the Buildkite GitHub App with permissions visibility and repository controls

GitHub Apps create a direct connection between your Buildkite and GitHub organizations, removing reliance on individual user connections. GitHub Organization Admins can then see permissions and manage access on a per-repo basisย ๐Ÿ™Œ๐Ÿป

Get started by installing the GitHub App from your Repository Providers page.

Samuel

New Repository Providers page

We've made it easier to manage multiple source control integrations ๐Ÿ”€ You can now find a list of connected and available integrations on the new Repository Providers page

Add Provider interface showing all possible providers including GitHub, GitHub Enterprise Server, and others

Click through to each provider for settings and delete options โš™๏ธ

Sam

Build page history fix

Previously when you clicked through a series of jobs in a build, using the browser's back button to step back through the jobs would not always work as expected ๐Ÿ‘พ

Weโ€™ve released a fix for the build page browser history list ๐Ÿ›  the back button will now reliably step back through and expand each job before returning to the previous page.

Harriet

Introducing the YAML Steps editor โœจ

After 2 years in beta, we are thrilled to promote the YAML Steps editor to our recommended way of managing your pipelines ๐ŸŽ‰

yaml-pipeline-with-sidebar.png

After migrating your pipeline to YAML Steps, you can find the new sidebar by clicking "Edit Steps" in your Pipeline Settings โœ๏ธ

You can now choose to make the YAML steps editor the default for any new pipelines created in your organization, and weโ€™ve added a migration tool to help org admins get their pipelines switched over.

We'll be announcing deprecation plans for the web steps editor in the coming months, so keep an eye out for the deprecation notice ๐Ÿ‘‹๐Ÿป

Harriet

Additional permissions controls for Enterprise

Enterprise organization admins can now choose to make pipelines read-only, as well as managing the ability to create, edit, or delete at an organization level ๐Ÿ”

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If youโ€™re on the Enterprise plan, you can access these new settings from your Organization's Permissions page. For more information about upgrading your team to Enterprise, get in touch through support@buildkite.com ๐Ÿ“จ

Harriet

Skipped builds now use "error" for GitHub commit statuses

Skipped builds are now marked as an "error" in GitHub commit statuses:

GitHub Commit Status showing a skipped build as errored

Build skipping, available from your Buildkite pipeline settings, saves you time by only testing the latest commit on a branch. Previously, a skipped build created a "success" commit status on GitHub, but this could give the false impression that the tests were run and passed.

The options here are pretty limited, but we've made this change to better reflect that the build is no longer pending, but didn't succeed or fail, it finished unusually.

Running another build on the same commit will replace this error status, and running builds on future commits will correctly update a pull request as expected.

Samuel

Laying the groundwork for Buildkite on Apple Silicon Macs

Weโ€™ve taken some steps to ensure that the Buildkite Agent is ready for upcoming Macs running on Apple Silicon. ๐Ÿ‘ฉ๐Ÿปโ€๐Ÿ’ปโœจ

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 itโ€™s feasible to do so.

Currently we suggest the 64-bit Intel amd64 binary, which happily runs under Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon. ๐Ÿฆพ

For those already adventuring on early Apple Silicon Macs, weโ€™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 donโ€™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. โœŒ๐Ÿผ

If you have any questions we havenโ€™t covered here, or run into some issues in your continuing adventures, please let us know via support@buildkite.com.

Jessica

Phabricator integration docs

We've released a step-by-step guide to setting up automated builds from your Phabricator commits โœจ

buildkite-phabricator.png

You can find the Phabricator guide under Integrations in the docs ๐Ÿ“š

Harriet

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