We've updated the navigation in the documentation to help you find the content you need quickly. 🎉

These changes include:

• Having the on-page navigation highlight which section you're reading.
• Revamping the style of the global navigation bar to a single row.
• Focusing on up-to-date and high-value pages like security while deemphasizing deprecated content.
• Highlighting the Overview page and Getting started guide for Pipelines.
• Updating the typography to improve readability.

Try out the new navigation

Pipelines now considers your current branch when surfacing options for a new build. This removes the friction of a new build defaulting to main.

This has been a highly-requested feature from our customers, and we’re so excited to share that the change is now live.

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. 📚

The v3.43.1 version of the buildkite-agent and the v5.16.1 version of the AWS elastic stack are now available.

Agent v3.43.1 fixes a bug introduced in v3.43.0 where jobs running on agents in --acquire-job mode will fail after about ~4.5 minutes. Agents running in non-acquire mode are not affected, and most of our customers don't use --acquire-job mode.

AWS Elastic Stack v5.16.1 upgrades the agent to this new version. Most elastic stack installations will not be affected by the above agent bug, but we still recommend upgrading to the latest version.

For a full list of additions, changes, and fixes, see the buildkite-agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

The 3.43.0 version of the buildkite-agent and the 5.16.0 version of the AWS elastic stack are now available.

This agent release fixes a panic that was accidentally added in v3.42.0, adds a flag to allow empty results with doing an artifact search, and Docker images for linux/arm64. Also, start --acquire-job now retries while the job is locked.

This agent release has been added to the 5.16.0 release of the elastic stack, which also includes Git v2.39.1 to address recent security vulnerabilities in Git, and now pushes access logs to Cloudwatch for Linux instances.

Two weeks ago we released the 3.42.0 version of the agent and the 5.15.0 version of the AWS elastic stack. This agent has added an experimental inbuilt status page, and a new agent-startup hook. The 5.15.0 release of the elastic stack added a parameter to enable server side encryption on s3 buckets created in the stack.

For a full list of additions, changes, and fixes, see the buildkite-agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

Customers using SSO authentication can now easily configure the SSO session duration via the settings UI–enabling greater control over your security posture.

Once the specified duration elapses, the user session will expire requiring re-authentication to access Buildkite.

Learn more about how to set up your SSO session duration

We’ve released the Developer plan, which replaces the legacy Free plan. The Developer plan continues to be free-of-charge, with the following updates:

• Continue to use the Buildkite platform to build, test, and deploy software at scale, with your team of up to 3 users
• Retain your builds for up to 30 days

You can learn more about our plans on our pricing page.

The 3.41.0 version of the buildkite-agent and the 5.14.0 version of the AWS elastic stack are now available.

The agent has added the ability to set a name for tracing, and experimental support to request OIDC tokens from the Buildkite backend. This agent release has been added to the 5.14.0 release of the elastic stack, as well as a parameter to encrypt EBS volumes and, "Desired Capacity" has been added to the list of Cloudwatch metrics collected from the stack's Autoscaling Group.

For a full list of additions, changes, and fixes, see the buildkite-agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

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 👋

The 3.40.0 version of the buildkite-agent and the 5.13.0 version of the AWS elastic stack are now available.

This release adds agent binaries for Windows/arm64, and fixes a few minor security issues. This agent release has been added to the release of the elastic stack.

For full list of additions, changes, and fixes, see the buildkite-agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

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 👋

Last week a serious vulnerability (CVE-2022-3786, CVE-2022-3602), was disclosed in the OpenSSL library. We’ve ensured that Buildkite internal systems, and our open source projects, are not vulnerable to this exploit.

We've performed an audit on our internal software and infrastructure, and we have no instances of OpenSSL 3.0.x in use directly or via dependencies, and therefore are not vulnerable to this exploit.

Additionally we've reviewed our open source projects (including the Buildkite Agent and the Elastic CI Stack for AWS) and have verified they also don't have any use of OpenSSL 3.0.x and are not vulnerable to (CVE-2022-3786, CVE-2022-3602).

If you have any further questions please contact support@buildkite.com.

The 3.39.1 version of the buildkite-agent and the 5.11.2 version of the AWS Elastic Stack are now available.

The 3.39.1 version of the buildkite agent is a security update that addresses the security advisory, that was previously disclosed here. This advisory applied to agents running in the same environment as the recently-released bash 5.2.

The 5.11.2 version of the AWS Elastic Stack updates the buildkite-agent to v3.39.1 and also fixes an issue with the date command in the log collector.

For the full list of additions, changes, and fixes, see the buildkite-agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

UPDATE: Agent 3.39.1 and AWS Elastic Stack for Buildkite 5.11.2 have been released to resolve this issue. We recommend you update to these versions if you are running Bash 5.2.

Bash 5.2 and the Buildkite Agent have a compatibility issue. This issue may reveal the values of environment variables exported by hooks that contain multiple lines. We recommend avoiding updating Bash until the Agent has been updated as well.

This new version of Bash was released 16 days ago. It includes an update that changes how environment variables are exported. When variables contain multiple lines Bash now exports them using $'...' style quoting.

The Buildkite Agent allows using hooks to customise how jobs are run. These hooks are Bash scripts. Hooks can change environment variables, and those changes are propagated into later hooks and commands. This is done by exporting the variables from the Bash script and parsing that output. It doesn't yet understand this new style of quoting, so environment variables with newlines are currently parsing incorrectly, and so are being lost between hooks and commands.

The Agent will print the names of environment variables which are changed by hooks. This new style of quote is mis-parsed, however, and the value may be considered part of the name. This can cause an escaped version of the value to be printed within the job log by mistake.

We're working on a fix to the agent, and should have a release out shortly.

In the meantime, we recommend remaining on Bash 5.1 or lower. You can check your Bash version with bash --version.

If you are running Bash 5.2 already, we recommend auditing your environment variables to see if any secrets contain newlines. If so, we recommend revoking those secrets, and rotating them to new values once you have downgraded Bash, or upgraded the Agent.

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 👋

Today we're rolling out some updates to Buildkite Pipelines that put developer productivity front and center by making failures more bold, and helping you find and fix failures faster:

Pipelines has grown many features over the years, with some of those additions making it harder to identify a failed build and figure out how to fix it. Check out the blog post to learn more about this first step, and our plans to deliver greater context within builds and across builds over time.

We'd love to hear what you think! Whether you reckon this is fresh as, or it’s missed the mark, 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

Buildkite agent v3.38.0 and AWS Elastic Stack v5.11.0 are now available!

Agent v3.38.0 adds the ability to trace build jobs using OpenTelemetry. This lets you do all sorts of interesting performance tracking — which jobs are taking the longest, performance and error rate trends, and which job phases are taking up the most time.

Here's a screenshot of OpenTelemetry in action, as viewed from Datadog in waterfall view:

This agent release has been added to the v5.11.0 release of the AWS Elastic Stack, along with the ability to specify which tracing backend to use from the Elastic Stack definition, as well as the ability to specify an arbitrary set of environment variables to start the agent with.

For full list of additions, changes, and fixes, see the agent changelog and the elastic-ci-stack-for-aws changelog on GitHub.

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 👋