Changelog

Changes

• Active user session timeout reduced from 1 year to 30 days
• Inactive user session timeout reduced from 2 weeks to 3 days

Effective November 30, 2025, CircleCI will reduce the inactive user session timeout from 2 weeks to 3 days and active user session timeout from 1 year to 30 days to align with NIST cybersecurity standards and enhance platform security.

What This Means

Active user sessions will be required to re-authenticate after 30 days (previously 1 year). Inactive accounts will be required to re-authenticate after 3 days (previous 2 weeks). SSO customers can still set custom session timeouts via their IdP provider. This change applies to all CircleCI web interface sessions.

Why We’re Making This Change

This update brings CircleCI in line with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) recommended security practices and reduces the risk of unauthorized access from dormant sessions.

Action Required

No immediate action is required. Users who access CircleCI regularly may notice they need to re-authenticate more often.

Timeline

November 30, 2025: New 30-day session timeout takes effect. Existing active user sessions longer than 30 days will be invalidated on this date. In-active user sessions longer than 3 days will be invalidated on this date.

As part of our ongoing infrastructure improvements, we will be deprecating Mac M1 and M2 resource classes on February 16th, 2026.

Ahead of the deprecation date, we will be performing 24 hour brownouts from 00:00:01 to 23:59:59 UTC, during which these resources will be unavailable. The schedule for brownouts is as follows:

It is possible to opt out of brownouts by disabling the setting at Organization Settings > Advanced > Enable image brownouts. However, please note that access to these resources will be fully removed on February 16th, 2026, regardless of brownout settings.

Please plan to transition to M4 instances (m4pro.medium and m4pro.large) ahead of the deprecation date. Details on M4 resources can be found here.

M4 resources will be made available to organizations on free plans starting November 10th, 2025.

The Xcode 26.1 Beta 2 image is now available to be used in CircleCI pipelines on the M4 Pro resource classes.

Please see the full manifest for information about the software included with this image release.

Known Issues:

• OS 26 simulators sporadically freeze during boot and may fail to start. We recommend pre-booting simulators and, if they don’t start within 60 seconds, terminate them and restart them.
• Metal Toolchain is currently non-functional. A workaround is available by running the following commands before use:

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent metalToolchain -exportPath /tmp/MetalExport/
    sed -i '' -e 's/17A5295f/17A5241e/g' /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle/ExportMetadata.plist
    xcodebuild -importComponent metalToolchain -importPath /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle

• Device IDs are inconsistently changing across VMs in Xcode 26. This is an OS-level issue that can affect builds relying on consistent device identifiers. We’ve opened a support ticket with Apple and encourage affected users to do the same to help prioritize a fix.

To streamline the setup of a Chunk environment file, you can now run ad-hoc commands in the environment defined by your cci-agent-setup.yml file and see instant feedback on whether they are working as expected.

Navigate to Organization Settings → Chunk Tasks → Select the gear symbol. Then follow the instructions on our community forum.

We’ve added a new banner that surfaces all your failed deployments across environments in one place so you can catch issues faster and get back to shipping.

Why we built this:

Failed deployments can be easy to miss, especially when managing multiple environments. You need a quick way to see what’s broken at a glance, without hunting through pipelines or workflows.

How it works: When you have failed deployments, you’ll see a banner at the top of your Deploys page with:

• A summary of all failures across your environments
• Namespace and version details when you hover over a specific deployment
• Direct links to the full error details by clicking the arrow on the right

This means less time tracking down what went wrong, and more time fixing it.

Starting November 3rd, CircleCI will begin to gradually roll out a faster checkout method (blobless) as the default checkout method.

Most builds will continue working without changes with blobless checkout. However, you need to take action if your builds require access to historical file contents. For example, tools like Sonar (SonarQube, SonarCloud), Sentry, some coverage or security scanning tools, and custom scripts that rely on git blame, git diff, or git config commands may require full checkout.

To opt into blobless checkout immediately, or to test compatibility, edit your CircleCI YML config to use the “blobless” method.

steps:
  - checkout:
      method: blobless

If your CircleCI job fails, or you prefer to keep the current checkout behavior, edit your config to use the “full” method.

steps:
  - checkout:
      method: full

If you do nothing and your builds break after November 3rd, you will be able to fix them by editing your config to use the “full” method.

Schedule triggers are now available for GitHub App pipelines. This feature allows teams to automatically run pipelines on a time-based schedule, with frequencies ranging from once every 5 minutes to less frequent intervals. Schedule triggers support configuring the actor associated with trigger pipelines, and passing custom parameters.

Getting started

Create GitHub App schedule triggers from the Project settings > Project setup page.

Availability

This functionality is available to all organizations that integrate with GitHub, regardless of whether they also use the GitHub OAuth integration (URLs may include /github/ or /circleci/). To learn more about using the GitHub App integration alongside GitHub OAuth, see the dedicated Docs page.

Notes

• GitHub App pipelines triggered via schedule trigger are never skipped nor auto-cancelled.
• Please note that, as specified in the documentation, a delay of up to 10 minutes may be applied to the configured time. Subsequent runs will maintain the same timing as the initial run.

Current limitations

Schedule triggers for GitHub App pipelines cannot yet be created or managed via API.

What’s next

GitHub App schedule triggers currently use a dropdown interface for frequency selection. We’re planning to transition to cron syntax for more flexible scheduling options. For questions or concerns about this plan, reach out to benedetta@circleci.com.

For more information about schedule triggers, see our documentation.

The Xcode 26.0.1 image is now available to be used in CircleCI pipelines on the M4 Pro resource classes.

Please see the full manifest for information about the software included with this image release.

Known Issues:

• iOS 26 simulators sporadically freeze during boot and may fail to start. We recommend pre-booting simulators and, if they don’t start within 60 seconds, terminate them and restart them.
• Metal Toolchain is currently non-functional. A workaround is available by running the following commands before use:

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent metalToolchain -exportPath /tmp/MetalExport/
    sed -i '' -e 's/17A5295f/17A5241e/g' /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle/ExportMetadata.plist
    xcodebuild -importComponent metalToolchain -importPath /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle
  

• Device IDs are inconsistently changing across VMs in Xcode 26. This is an OS-level issue that can affect builds relying on consistent device identifiers. We’ve opened a support ticket with Apple and encourage affected users to do the same to help prioritize a fix.

The Xcode 26.1 Beta 1 image is now available to be used in CircleCI pipelines on the M4 Pro resource classes.

Please see the full manifest for information about the software included with this image release.

Known Issues:

• iOS 26 simulators sporadically freeze during boot and may fail to start. We recommend pre-booting simulators and, if they don’t start within 60 seconds, terminate them and restart them.
• Metal Toolchain is currently non-functional. A workaround is available by running the following commands before use:

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent metalToolchain -exportPath /tmp/MetalExport/
    sed -i '' -e 's/17A5295f/17A5241e/g' /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle/ExportMetadata.plist
    xcodebuild -importComponent metalToolchain -importPath /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle
  

• Device IDs are inconsistently changing across VMs in Xcode 26. This is an OS-level issue that can affect builds relying on consistent device identifiers. We’ve opened a support ticket with Apple and encourage affected users to do the same to help prioritize a fix.

CircleCI regularly publishes new images and deprecates older ones used for execution environments. As part of the deprecation process, we run brownouts—short time windows where a soon-to-be retired image is temporarily unavailable. Brownouts help notify users that the image is reaching end-of-life and needs to be upgraded.

To give organizations more control, we’ve added a setting in the CircleCI web app: Organization Settings → Advanced → Enable image brownouts

On (default): Brownouts apply as usual.

Off: Brownouts are disabled for your organization, allowing continued use of the image until it is fully retired.

Note: Changes to this toggle may take up to 10 minutes to take effect. Only organization admins can change this setting.

Users can now specify a checkout method when using the checkout step. In addition to a traditional full clone, we now support blobless clones. Blobless clones reduce the amount of data fetched from the remote by asking the remote to filter out objects that are not attached to the current commit, resulting in faster checkouts for most projects.

You can perform a blobless clone by setting the method key in your checkout step:

jobs:
  build:
    steps:
      - checkout:
          method: blobless

Learn more about the new method key in our documentation.

For customers needing a more granular control, we now support automatic step rerun to complement our existing workflow rerun feature.

Rather than rerunning entire workflows, you can now automatically rerun specific failed steps. Simply specify max_auto_reruns in your run step configuration with a value between 1 and 5. You can also configure an optional auto_rerun_delay (up to 10 minutes) to give temporary issues time to resolve before retrying, such as when resources need time to become available again.

The UI provides clear indicators showing the current attempt number and remaining retries. This feature is available to all CircleCI customers across all plan types.

For more details on configuring automatic step reruns, visit the documentation.

The Xcode 26.0 GA image is now available to be used in CircleCI pipelines on the M4 Pro resource classes.

Please see the full manifest for information about the software included with this image release.

Known Issues:

• iOS 26 simulators sporadically freeze during boot and may fail to start. We recommend pre-booting simulators and, if they don’t start within 60 seconds, terminate them and restart them.
• Metal Toolchain is currently non-functional. A workaround is available by running the following commands before use:

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent metalToolchain -exportPath /tmp/MetalExport/
    sed -i '' -e 's/17A5295f/17A5241e/g' /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle/ExportMetadata.plist
    xcodebuild -importComponent metalToolchain -importPath /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle
  

• Device IDs are inconsistently changing across VMs in Xcode 26. This is an OS-level issue that can affect builds relying on consistent device identifiers. We’ve opened a support ticket with Apple and encourage affected users to do the same to help prioritize a fix.
• See this community forum post for a workaround to a bug in the iOS 26 simulator device.

It is now possible to configure pipelines to be triggered whenever a pull request is merged or closed. Previously, only the option “PR merged” was available.

The primary use case for this trigger option is running cleanup / teardown pipelines to remove temporary resources that were provisioned when the PR was opened.

When this option is selected, pipelines will run by default on the base branch on the PR - as opposed to the head branch.

For more information and a full list of GitHub trigger event options, visit the dedicated Docs page.

Following our updated Xcode image retention policy we will be deprecating Xcode versions which are no longer supported. We will additionally be performing 24 hour brownouts from 00:00:01 to 23:59:59 UTC during which these images will be unavailable. The brownout and deprecation schedule can be found below.

Customers will no longer see configuration errors when all workflows in their pipeline are intentionally filtered out using when conditions.

Previously in the pipelines page, customers saw this error when all workflows were filtered out:

Here is the updated experience:

The Xcode 26.0 Beta 7 image is now available to be used in CircleCI pipelines on the M4 Pro resource classes.

Please see the full manifest for information about the software included with this image release.

Known Issues:

• iOS 26 simulators sporadically freeze during boot and may fail to start. We recommend pre-booting simulators and, if they don’t start within 60 seconds, terminate them and restart them.
• Metal Toolchain is currently non-functional. A workaround is available by running the following commands before use:

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent metalToolchain -exportPath /tmp/MetalExport/
    sed -i '' -e 's/17A5295f/17A5241e/g' /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle/ExportMetadata.plist
    xcodebuild -importComponent metalToolchain -importPath /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle
  

What’s New: We’ve introduced a guided rollback wizard that walks you through setting up both deploy markers and rollback pipelines in a single, structured workflow.

Key Improvements:

• Step-by-step guidance through deploy marker configuration
• Automated rollback pipeline creation with proper parameters

Getting Started: The refined rollback wizard is available now in your Project Overview page. Look for the “rollback” dropdown and click “Create Rollback Pipeline” to get started!

https://circleci.com/docs/guides/deploy/set-up-rollbacks/

The Xcode 26.0 Beta 6 image is now available to be used in CircleCI pipelines on the M4 Pro resource classes.

Please see the full manifest for information about the software included with this image release.

Known Issues:

• iOS 26 simulators sporadically freeze during boot and may fail to start. We recommend pre-booting simulators and, if they don’t start within 60 seconds, terminate them and restart them.
• Metal Toolchain is currently non-functional. A workaround is available by running the following commands before use:

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent metalToolchain -exportPath /tmp/MetalExport/
    sed -i '' -e 's/17A5295f/17A5241e/g' /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle/ExportMetadata.plist
    xcodebuild -importComponent metalToolchain -importPath /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle
  

Updates

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where “empty pipelines” responses from the API would prevent the UI from loading.
• docker-provisioner-provisioner will roll when a manually provided certificate is changed

Chart Updates

The following charts have moved from Bitnami-hosted to CircleCI-hosted:

• postgresql
• mongodb
• redis
• rabbitmq

Image Updates

The following images have moved from Bitnami-hosted to CircleCI-hosted:

• mongodb
• redis

The following images have been updated since 4.8.1:

• webhook-service
• permissions-service
• domain-service
• orb-service
• policy-service
• web-ui-server-admin
• branch-service
• authentication-svc
• workflows-conductor
• builds-service
• cron-service

NOTE

Please note this release has been marked as broken and should not applied. Fixes will be applied in the 4.7.8 patch.

Updates

• Enable Redis permissions cache in server
• Stopped sending duplicate execution-engine-config-str spec to WFC, reducing message size by up to 15 MB for large customer configs

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where “empty pipelines” responses from the API would prevent the UI from loading.
• The authentication process now correctly utilizes a cache for JWT.
• docker-provisioner-provisioner will roll when a manually provided certificate is changed
• Addressed CVEs in authentication-service, api-service and web-ui services

Chart Updates

The following charts have moved from Bitnami-hosted to CircleCI-hosted:

• postgresql
• mongodb
• redis
• rabbitmq

Image Updates

The following images have moved from Bitnami-hosted to CircleCI-hosted:

• mongodb
• redis

The following images have been updated since 4.7.6:

• postgres
• rabbitmq
• web-ui-onboarding
• web-ui-org-settings
• cron-service
• web-ui-insights
• web-ui
• ciam-gateway
• branch-service
• web-ui-authentication
• workflows-conductor
• authentication-svc
• api-service
• runner-admin
• domain-service
• policy-service
• builds-service

The Project settings > Project setup page now allows disabling GitHub App and Custom Webhook triggers. This is useful when iterating on trigger configuration, as it enables pausing pipeline triggering without deleting a trigger.

The same functionality is available programmatically through the Triggers API.

Added @latest tag to all NPX and Docker installation commands across multiple IDE integrations to ensure users always get the current version and prevent compatibility issues.

We’ve also added a troubleshooting section to help resolve common installation issues.

To see the full list of IDE integrations or for troubleshooting support, see our MCP server documentation.

CircleCI will no longer support the following Orbs due to limited or no use.

• microsoft-psscriptanalyzer
• irc
• github-super-linter
• microsoft-msix
• waypoint
• lein-nvd

What does this mean?

• The Orb will no longer receive updates, bug fixes, or security patches
• The repository will be archived and made read-only
• No new issues or pull requests will be accepted
• Existing functionality may continue to work but without any support guarantees

What You Should Do

If you would like to use or create your own version of any of the orbs listed, feel free to fork the repository and use the following Build Private CircleCI Orbs documentation as a guide to making this orb into a private orb for your own use.

Repositories:

• microsoft-psscriptanalyzer-orb
• irc-orb
• GitHub-Super-Linter-Orb
• microsoft-msix-orb
• waypoint-orb
• lein-nvd_orb

Users can now set cache retention periods at the job level using the retention key in CircleCI config. Job level retention overrides the retention period set in plan usage controls, allowing users to optimize cache storage for their individual jobs. Flexible cache retention periods are useful for workflows with varying cache needs, such as short-lived feature branch jobs or jobs with frequently changing dependencies.

Set cache retention at the job level

jobs:
 hello-world:
   machine:
    image: ubuntu-2404:current
   steps:
    - run:
      name: Hello World
      command: echo "hello-world"
   retention:
    caches: 5d  # Keep caches for 5 days instead of default

Job-level settings can only reduce retention - not extend beyond plan limits. If retention is not set at the job level, caches will be stored for the period set in plan usage controls.

Learn more about CircleCI retention settings in our documentation.

Test Quality Agent now in Beta

A new agentic capability is now available in private beta that automatically identifies and fixes flaky tests in your CircleCI projects. This agent helps reduce debugging time by analyzing inconsistent test behavior and creating pull requests with validated solutions.

Read the full announcement and setup guide on Discuss

How it Works:

• Identifies flaky tests with inconsistent pass/fail behavior
• Generates and validates multiple solution attempts per test
• Creates PRs only when solutions pass reliability validation
• Provides detailed logs and code diffs for review

Beta Details:

• No extra cost during beta (uses existing compute credits and AI provider tokens)
• Join the waitlist for access
• Feedback welcome at ai-feedback@circleci.com

The Xcode 26.0 Beta 5 image is now available to be used in CircleCI pipelines on the M4 Pro resource classes.

Please see the full manifest for information about the software included with this image release.

Known Issues:

• iOS 26 simulators sporadically freeze during boot and may fail to start. We recommend pre-booting simulators and, if they don’t start within 60 seconds, terminate them and restart them.
• Metal Toolchain is currently non-functional. A workaround is available by running the following commands before use:

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent metalToolchain -exportPath /tmp/MetalExport/
    sed -i '' -e 's/17A5295f/17A5241e/g' /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle/ExportMetadata.plist
    xcodebuild -importComponent metalToolchain -importPath /tmp/MetalExport/MetalToolchain-17A5295f.exportedBundle