Changelog

Manual pipeline run button

What’s New

There is now a button on the top left of the Pipelines page, next to the “Edit Config” button, to manually run a new pipeline from the UI. You must first select a branch, and then the pipeline is run at the HEAD of that branch.

Link to former re-run-with-SSH job provided from Job page

What’s New

If you navigate away from an SSH job while it is running, there is currently no process for you to navigate back to the SSH job to cancel the job. If you are on a legacy container plan, this may cause a bottleneck in your queue, resulting in you having to contact CircleCI Support to resolve the issue.

With this update, a link is now provided to the “rerun-with-SSH job” from the job it ran from so you can cancel the job more quickly. Please note that there is a version when the job is still running, and a different version when the job has stopped running.

UX Updates

What’s New

In order to improve the overall user experience, the following updates and changes have been made to the CircleCI user interface:

Show tag name on Job and Workflow page

The tag name is now displayed on the details section of the Job and Workflow page between the Executor and Commit listing.

Show failed test names on Pipelines page

Failed tests are now listed on the Pipelines page, below the job in which they failed. This helps you to see the details of a failure more quickly.

Allow test summaries to be collapsible

When uploading test XML files to our system, CircleCI parses these files into a test summary, which can sometimes make the result large and unwieldy. This update allows you to click a carrot arrow on the top left of the output section that will minimize it so you can get to the next issue faster.

Improved tooltip on job duration/finish time

The tooltip on the Pipelines, Workflows and Jobs page has been improved. Now, when you hover over the time a job was run, the information is displayed immediately. The time is now in the format: ““Started: [Day of week], Month Day, Year at xx:xx:xx PM UTC-X.”

Blue dot on test summary if not used

If you are not currently uploading test XML metadata to our system, you will see a small blue dot next to the Test Summary tab on the Job page that will disappear when clicked. Once on the Job page, an illustration is displayed along with links to the CircleCI documentation describing test summary functionality.

Filter by status on Pipelines page

When viewing the full list of pipelines, you may now filter that list by status of the pipelines (with failed, with no failed). This should help you find the build you are looking for more quickly.

Line numbers shown and linkable from step output page

When viewing the step output page, you can now see the line number of each step. You can also highlight a specific number and click to copy it if you want to share this step with another person. This improvement should help you receive help and resolve builds more quickly.

Toast pops up after rerunning with SSH

When you click “rerun with SSH” from the job page, a new SSH job will load. This may take a little longer than expected. In order to prevent any confusion, a small informational toast now appears in the bottom right stating “SSH job loading”.

Private Orbs for All Paid Plans

What’s New

Previously available to all of our Scale plan customers, we are now allowing all paid customers to access up to 3 Private Orbs. Note that Scale Plan customers will still have full access to an unlimited number of private orbs.

CircleCI orbs, launched two years ago, have helped users simplify their entire development process. However, we realize that many developers may want to share configuration provately across multiple projects, exclusively within their organization and not to the entire world. Private orbs enable you to share these orbs within your organization.

For more information on private orbs, refer to the technical documentation, which can be found here

Xcode 12.5 Image Now Available

What’s New

The Xcode 12.5 image, built with Big Sur, is now available on all CircleCI macOS resources. This enables you to build applications for the latest iOS, tvOS, and watchOS versions.

For more information, please refer to the following Discuss post, which can be found here.

Additional remote Docker version now available.

What’s New

An additional version of Docker (v20.10.6) is now available for CircleCI’s remote Docker engine.

For more information on this and other remote docker versions, refer to the Remote Docker Version documentation here.

Arm Compute Now Generally Available

What’s New

After a successful preview phase, Arm compute is now generally available on CircleCI Cloud. Customers on all usage-based plans can access the arm.medium resource (including the Free plan and OSS organizations). The arm.large resource is available to all Performance, Scale, and Custom customers.

For more information about CircleCI’s Arm compute resources, refer to the following CircleCI Arm documentation, which can be found here

Empty State Improvement on Plan Usage UI

What’s New

The empty state UI that is displayed when a billing period has been selected for which there has been no credit usage has been improved. This could be the case if you have not used CircleCI recently, or you have just set up your account to start using CircleCI.

Previously, a detailed message was shown that required you to refresh the page in order to select another billing period. In this new experience, you can navigate the page while providing an option to change the billing period selected within the UI.

Updated Sample Config Templates

What’s New

Some notable updates have been made to our sample configuration templates.

The top five most popular sample configuration templates (.NET, Android, Maven (Java), Node, Python) have been updated. These updates include:

• Updated to version 2.1
• Included orbs when applicable
• Added comments for education and learning
• Provided a more robust display of CircleCI concepts like workflows, jobs, steps
• Six Node sample configs are now displayed which meet different goals (either from orbs or custom config), instead of only showing one that is generic to that language

Finally, we have updated discoverability and access to these sample configs by hosting them in a modal instead of dropdown. The improved card layout and addition of content makes choosing a sample config simple and easy.

`matches` logical statement in config

What’s New

A new logical statement has been added to the config called matches, which takes a map with two parameters: pattern and value. If the value is a regex match to pattern, the value will be returned as true. This type of regex matching in when statements enables customers who want to filter individual steps or entire workflows based upon branch or tag to do so in a more consistent way that matches whatever logic they want to use.

For more information about this addition to the configuration, refer to the CircleCI Configuration Reference documentation, which can be found here:

Using when in workflows

You may also refer to the following Canny post, which is resolved by this feature:

Branch filtering on workflow level

Plans Usage Page Performance Improvements

What’s New

Significant performance improvements have been made on the Plan Usage page to reduce page load times, ensuring high usage customers can access and load this page without page timeouts.

Updated Windows Executor Images

What’s New

Some users of our Windows executor images may have experienced a recent issue with ‘nuget restore’ failing to download packages from the nuget.org package source when running ‘choco install’ before running ‘nuget restore.’

To address this issue, the Windows executor image has been updated to include a user-wide NuGet config file with nuget.org configured as a package source.

For more information about this workaround, please refer to this Discuss post.

Insights Dashboard - All Branch Filtering

What’s New

Previously, the Insights experience was scoped at a single branch level. Starting from today, you can now access Insights data across all of your branches, making it easier to understand workflow and job performance across an entire project.

Dynamic config via Setup Workflows

What’s New

Dynamic config via Setup workflows is now generally available for customers to use CircleCI jobs to generate pipeline parameters and configurations. These generated parameters and configurations are appended to the existing pipeline and enable customers to dynamically generate configurations based on runtime inputs. Since this functionality is already used in existing workflows/jobs structure, orbs can be used as part of setup workflows, which will enable you, and the community at large, to cover different dynamic configuration use cases by building orbs for different use cases.

One specific use case that has been enabled by setup workflows is path filtering, where you can determine which workflows should be run based on which files are modified (determined via a set of Git operations in a script). This is a key feature if you are using monorepos and will help you optimize your build processes. An orb also been developed to assist you in enabling path filtering.

For more detailed information about Dynamic Configurations, please refer to our product announcement, which can be found here.

For information on getting started with this feature, go to the product documentation, which can be found here.

Updated Windows Executor Image

What’s New

The Windows executor image has been updated for April, which includes the latest bug fixes and security patches from Microsoft.

New Insights Landing Page & Project Details Page

What’s New

The Insights landing page has been updated to provide users with detailed performance summaries for each project in an organization. With this update, we have also simplified the landing page to display performance per project and also made it easier for larger organizations to use.

Additionally, we have also added a new Project Details view that enables further exploration of project-specific data. You will notice this page now supports multi-branch filtering to enable workflow and branch breakdown, enabling more granular insights for users.

Insights Metric Glossary + Docs Revamp

What’s New

Users will now be able to access the Insights Metric Glossary. This feature provides detailed definitions and examples for Insights metrics including how they are calculated, allowing you to make the most of the insights dashboard. Additionally, users can now access a dedicated Insights section in the CircleCI documentation for easy access to detailed Insights content.

First Party Orb Version Badge Service

What’s New

Previously, CircleCI orb version badges were generated through shields.io, with data provided by a small service that a CircleCI CPE member managed. Although this process was not officially managed by CircleCI, with this update, this feature now consolidates the entire orb version badge generation process within CircleCI.

For more detailed information about this update, refer to the Orb Version Badge discuss post.

Note: While this update has been available for a while, we have purposely limited promotion to enable us to monitor this update closely.

Android Machine Image

What’s New

A new Android machine image has been added, with support for nested virtualization and running x86 emulators. With this new image, you can now run Android emulator-based UI tests and other types of builds that require nested virtualization, on CircleCI.

For more information about this Android machine image, refer to the Discuss post that describes this new image.

You may also refer to the following Canny posts, which address specific customer requests and issues:

• Android x86 EmulatorSupport
• Nested Virtualization Support

Test Insights

What’s New

Test Insights is now available to all cloud customers in Open Preview. Test Insights is our most requested Insights feature, so we are excited to deliver this feature to users. With Test Insights, you will now be able to analyze test performance within your most recent executions and identify additional opportunities for test optimization.

For more information about how to access the Test Insights preview, refer to this Discuss page.

Context REST API

What’s New

The Context REST API was built to enable secure secrets rotation and move towards having RESTful public APIs. In order to enable GA, our teams made the following improvements:

• Performance improvements
• Added validation
• Improved Audit logging of Contexts
• Documentation to describe the benefits of the Contexts API and how you can securely rotate secrets.

Plan Usage Design Update

What’s New

The design on the usage summary on the Plan Usage page has been updated. The details shown are now based on the feature available on each plan type. This aligns the design across the different plan types to provide a more consistent user experience.

Overlay2 on Remote Docker jobs

What’s New

As a part of a regular update, a change was made to make Remote Docker machines use Overlay2 as a storage driver. This change caused some jobs using Docker Layer Caching (DLC) to fail on COPY steps in Docker multi-stage builds. The issue should get automatically resolved as DLC volumes get rotated, however, if the issue persists, please open a new support ticket so we can help you address the issue.

Personal and Project API Tokens Documentation

What’s New

In order to better support and improve security for customers, our teams have provided some best practices in our CircleCI documentation:

• API-based token rotation - this describes how to rotate API-based token rotation including personal and Project API tokens.
• Environment variable rotation - this describes how to rotate, use and delete environment variables

For more information about rotating Personal and Project API tokens, refer to the updated documentation, which can be found here.

Context Environment Variable Rotation Documentation

What’s New

In order to support and improve security for our customers, the CircleCI documentation has been updated to describe environment variable rotation and how it is important for security. Also included in this documentation update are instructions describing how you can rotate environment variables.

You can find detailed information about these changes here.

Org Trends & Percentile/Average Trends

What’s New

Trends data is now available at the organization level. Additionally, trends for the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR), Throughput, and Duration metrics have been added. As a reminder, Trends provides relative benchmarks for the 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day time windows against previous time windows.

New Email Notifications for Impersonations

What’s New

When support needs to impersonate your account to troubleshoot an issue you reported, you will now receive an email to notify you they are doing so.

New JSON Toggle in Configuration

What’s New

You can now view your configuration in YAML with a side-by-side JSON view, enabling you to solve your configuration in a more familiar language.

Windows Executor Images Update

What’s New

The most recent images for the Windows executor now include the .NET Core SDK 3.1. This means you will now have access to the latest version out-of-the-box, as the old Windows version has been deprecated.

Configuration Editor Expansion

What’s New

CircleCI’s in-app configuration editor makes it quick and easy to resolve errors and write your config file. Features include:

• live validation/error checking
• autocomplete
• configuration snippets specific to the CircleCI syntax
• education of CCI concepts through tool tips
• access to popular documentation

This feature can be conveniently accessed upon project set up, on your dashboard when a project and branch are chosen, in the More Menu under Configuration File, and in-line when your pipeline or job fails.

Private Orbs for Scale Customers

What’s New

Today we are enabling private orbs for our Scale customers.

Two years ago, open-source orbs were launched, helping users to simplify their entire development process. However, we also knew that many developers wanted to privately share configurations across multiple projects, exclusively within their own organization. Private orbs enable users to create orbs specific to their organization without exposing sensitive data or content to users outside of that organization.

You may now create, publish, and update private orbs via your organization’s admin. These private orbs will be restricted to, and accessible by, all users within the organization, and can be listed and imported into a config.yml file directly from the CircleCI CLI.

For more information about private orbs, refer to the Circle CI orbs documentation, which can be found here.

New Remote Docker Versions

What’s New

Two new versions of Remote Docker (v19.03.14 and v20.10.2) have been released and are now available for use.

Faster Git Checkouts

What’s New

You will now see a faster checkout step in your CircleCI jobs. The built-in checkout step now does a git clone without checkout, followed by checking out the branch (overwriting existing) at the SHA received from the VCS provider. In addition to speeding up the checkouts, a number of Git checkout-related issues have been resolved, resulting in improved reliability of the checkout step.

Tooltip Updates

What’s New

We have introduced a few new tooltips to improve your experience on the platform:

• On the right side of the Job page, jobs now specify whether the job was split up into parallel runs. If a job was split, you are able to see what level of parallelism was used out of how much was available. Previously, this tooltip only displayed the browser’s title attribute, but now you will be able to instantly find information on increasing parallelism.

• On the right side of the Pipelines page, there are three different workflow actions: rerun, rerun from failed, and cancel. An instant tooltip is now displayed to help you learn how to quickly rerun pipelines.

Test Output Boxes Now Black

What’s New

When you navigate to the Tests tab of a job page with failing tests, the output boxes used to have a light grey background with black text. These output boxes now have a black background with white text to match the output boxes in the Steps tab. This change addresses requests from users who dislike reading long outputs on lighter backgrounds.

Invite Team Button

What’s New

On a project-specific Pipelines page, there is now a link where you can invite a new team member to the project. When you click this button, a modal pops-up where you can copy a link to the Project page. Any team member who then opens the copied link will auto-follow the project. This feature helps you to get more of your teammates onboard and building with you on CircleCI.

Overlay2/XFS filesystem on all Docker jobs

What’s New

As a part of a regular update, we are rolling out a change to the filesystem in the machines that all Docker executor jobs run on. The filesystem the Docker jobs use will now be XFS with the Overlay2 storage driver. Initial metrics of this change suggest faster and more reliable build times. You will not need to make any changes to take advantage of this update.

You can read more about this update in the following post:

Discuss

Arm Resources on CircleCI

What’s New

We have initiated a preview of hosted Arm resources on CircleCI. Arm is an architecture that is quickly gaining traction for server workloads. Organizations choose Arm because of its faster performance, which results in faster workloads and significant cost savings compared to x86-based architectures. An essential piece of migrating workloads to Arm is having Arm support in your CI system. If you are on a usage-based plan, including the Free plan, you may request access to the Arm preview. We are making two arm64 resources available: arm.medium and arm.large.

To request access, customers must fill out an access form that is linked in the preview docs below.

Preview docs

2021 Q1 Linux Image Updates

What’s New

The software for the standard Linux Ubuntu 16.04 and 20.04 images has been upgraded to support amd64 and arm64 images. The ARM image specifically is still under preview with overall CircleCI ARM support. The standard images are GA releases.

Failed tests listed above tabs

What’s New

If you have configurations set up to collect test metadata, you will now have an easier time understanding what tests may have failed. On each Job page with a failed test, there is now a box above the steps/tests/artifacts tabs with a summary of how many tests failed, how many tests ran, and links to the names of each test that failed. The links jump to the output of the test failure further down the page. There is also a copy button to the right of each name if you would like to copy the name and rerun it in your personal IDE.

Link to Config and Project Settings from Insights

What’s New

You can now navigate to your Config Editor and Project Settings from the Insights dashboard. Previously, you would have had to leave Insights and navigate to the dashboard/pipelines tab to access these settings. This update provides easier access to these settings.

Job Trends

What’s New

You can now access Trends data on the Job Insights page. As a reminder, Trends provides relative benchmarks for the 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day time windows against previous time windows.

Persisting Selected Branches

What’s New

Insights now persists the current branch when navigating from the pipelines or workflow runs pages. The dashboard displays the current/selected branch instead of defaulting to main. Similarly, on the Insights dashboard, changing workflows on a given branch no longer results in the branch reverting to main.

Concurrency and Parallelism Limits Update

What’s New

Concurrency and parallelism limits have been increased from 40x to 80x for all new and existing Performance Plan customers.

Workflow Trends

What’s New

Raw metric values are often difficult to interpret and perform actions on without context. The Trends feature provides additional context presenting a relative benchmark against previous performance, enabling you to retrieve more data and gain additional insight into your data. The workflow details page supports trends for the 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day time windows.

Job Insights Export

What’s New

You may now export the jobs table from the Insights dashboard as a CSV file. Downloaded reports can be used to run additional offline analysis or share with coworkers.

SSH DSA Keys No Longer Accepted

What’s New

You will now be unable to add SSH DSA keys to projects. Please note that SSH has defaulted to RSA keys for a long period of time and DSA keys have been deprecated. The error message that appears when trying to add a key of this type is unsupported key type: ssh-dss. If you experience this error, please use a more modern supported key type (RSA, ECDSA etc).

GPU Linux Machine Images

What’s New

The GPU Linux machine images have been updated. Images for CUDA v10.2 and v11.1 are now available as ubuntu-1604-cuda-10.2:202012-01 and ubuntu-1604-cuda-11.1:202012-01.

SSH Key Support

What’s New

You can now add any combination of SSH key cipher / encoding. Specifically, we now support the ed25519 cipher, openssh encoding, and keys are not restricted to using the older (now non-default) PEM encoding. For more information, see the SSH keys guide in our docs.

CircleCI and GitHub Default Branch

What’s New

If you change your default branch on GitHub, CircleCI will pick up that change and update the default branch for the project the next time you push some code. This is a bug fix – previously, changes to the default branch would not be picked up. This fix is retroactive and self-healing.

Legacy Jobs Redirect to Non-Legacy

What’s New

When opening a job from the Legacy (jobs-based) run view, if the job has Pipeline data, it will now redirect from the legacy job view without pipeline data to the new UI view. Many cusomers use the legacy jobs-based view to find old SSH jobs, so this helps get to a page where they can cancel these jobs faster.

Collapsable Error Messages on Pipelines Page

What’s New

We have improved the error experience on the Pipelines Dashaboard by surfacing the main error and collapsing the details. This allows for quick scan accessibility, reduces visual clutter, and makes for a more consumable format instead of the full stack trace.

CircleCI Runners

What’s New

The runner feature is now available to customers on the Scale plan. Using runners, you can run private workloads using your own infrastructure while also using CircleCI’s cloud offering. Organizations can also use runners to build on specialized hardware. Learn more about runners in the Runner Overview doc.

Scale Plan

What’s New

The Scale plan is now available, providing improved support for enterprise organisations, including access to self-hosted runners, custom concurrency limits, our largest compute resouces and customizable annual billing options.

Visual Explanation of Hierarchy

What’s New

When a new organization has less than 20 pipeline runs within an project, a diagram is displayed to explain the concepts of job vs. workflow vs. pipeline.

Pipelines Page now Dashboard

What’s New

The “Pipelines” link in the CircleCI app sidebar, which leads to the cross-project Pipelines view, is now called the “Dashboard” for a clearer route back to viewing all your runs in one place.

Insights Time Filters

What’s New

A selection of time filters have been added to the Insights workflow overview in the CircleCI app. You can now look at 24 hour, or 7/30/60/90 day time windows when reviewing your workflows Insights. Configurable time range is the most popular request on our ideas board, and we are excited to deliver a feature that gives you more granular control over your data.

New PHP Docker Convenience Image

What’s New

A new PHP convenience image has been published. For more infomation see our discuss post.

Docker Hub Authenticated Pulls

What’s New

CircleCI has partnered with Docker to ensure that our users can continue to access Docker Hub without rate limits. As of November 1st 2020, with few exceptions, CircleCI customers should not be impacted by any rate limits when pulling images from Docker Hub. Learn more in our Docker Authenticated Pulls doc.

Insights Dashboard Project Picker

What’s New

You can now easily filter the projects you wish to view on the Insights dashboard page in the UI. This makes navigation easier, allowing you to easily find and view the projects you care about.

Follow and Unfollow Projects from Pipelines Dashboard

What’s New

You can now follow and unfollow projects within your organization directly from the Pipelines dashboard. Previously all follow/unfollow options were only available through a redirect to the Add Projects page.

Job Links are now Blue on Pipelines Dashboard

What’s New

Job links in the UI are now blue rather than black to make naviagation between pipeline elements easier.

Import Env Vars in Project Settings

What’s New

All organizations can now import environment variables from one project to another, as an alternative to using contexts to share them. This functionality was present on the old UI but initially not released on the new UI. All users can now access it by navigating to “Environment Variables” within project settings.

Refill Change on Performance Plan

What’s New

Performance plan credit refills will now be triggered at 2% and refills will be no smaller than 25,000 credits (or 25%). For more information see our billing FAQs.

New Machine Images

What’s New

New Ubuntu 16.04 and 20.04 Linux machine images are now available. For more information, and usage examples, see our discuss post.

Bitbucket API Deprecation Update

What’s New

Bitbucket announced the deprecation of its /2.0/teams and most /2.0/users endpoints and some response fields as part of its transition to their new “workspaces” domain model and API. Workspaces will replace teams; both of these concepts map directly to orgs in CircleCI. There should be no impact to customers.

Configuration Validator added to In-App Editor

What’s New

Configuration validation is now available in the in-app config editor to visually show config status at the point of adding a config to your project.

Auto-Collapse Pipelines Toggle

What’s New

You can now toggle the auto-expand pipleines options on or off in the top-right corner of the pipelines dashboard. This is especially useful if you have pipelines containing many jobs, giving the advantage of keeping these pipelines collapsed, and if you have pipelines containing a small number of jobs you may prefer the auto-expand option.

Insights Dashboard

What’s New

The new Insights dashboard offers engineering teams access to actionable data for optimizing pipelines and getting even more out of CircleCI. With this feature, engineering teams will be better able to understand bottlenecks and identify optimization opportunities. Teams will be able to track workflow & job status, monitor duration and understand their pipeline throughput & mean time to recovery. Finally, Insights will serve to highlight the impact of more efficient CI/CD and to foster a better relationship with customers and provide a better experience. For more information, see the Using Insights guide.

Automated Custom Plan

What’s New

The new Custom Plan will automatically track your usage, be able to provide real-time credit usage and balance information, and produce reports to accounting for invoicing. You will also be able to use user seats and be billed via credits for the usage.

Additional Triggers for PRs via API

What’s New

Pipelines can now be triggered via the API for PRs (using PR number instead of branch), PR merge commits, and Forked PRs. This enables you to more easily validate new code from PRs. Triggering on PRs and PR merge commits offers the ability to better validate PRs in a programmatic way. Triggering pipelines on forked PRs is valuable for customers who have open source repositories that are frequently forked.

Commit SHA Link on Pipelines Page

What’s New

All Pipelines are now listed with the commit SHA in front of the commit message, which links directly to the commit in your VCS. This gives you a quick way to get to commits in your VCS from the Pipelines page.

Developer Hub

What’s New

We now offer a way for our user community to find all the best CI/CD config optimizations, migration guides/tools, and CircleCI docs, along with assets like CI configuration packages through CircleCI orbs and a newly designed Docker convenience image library, in one convenient place on our new developer hub. Check out the announcement here.

Multiple Contexts Per Workflow

What’s New

Multiple contexts can now be used in a Workflow. Previously, workflows were limited to having a single context. Instead of passing in a string to the context key in the config file, a list may be passed containing the contexts to be used in the workflow. This makes updates to contexts easier to manage and more secure.

Update to Credits Available on Plan Overview

What’s New

The ‘credits available’ section of the Plan Overview in the UI has been updated to clarify some confusion around understanding credit balance. The bar display has been removed and the credits balance is now clearly shown.

Workflows Map Improvements

What’s New

Workflow Map connection lines are now straight and do not overlap. When you hover-over of a job, all dependencies from and to that job are highlighted.

Previous MacOS Trials No Longer Display as MacOS Plans in UI

What’s New

Fixed a bug that was causing previous macOS trials to show as $0 plans on the Plan Overview page. Old trials are no longer visible in the UI.

Improved Config Error when Config File is Empty

What’s New

The config error message shown when there is an empty config file on triggering a pipeline has been improved to both clearly state the problem, and provide a way to get back to project setup to add a config.

Share Plan Now Includes Premium Features

What’s New

Child orgs now get premium features, including resource class allowance and DLC, from the parent org when plans are shared.

Branch and Commit Combined on Pipelines Dashboard View

What’s New

The Branch and Commit message columns have been combined on the pipelines dashboard view of the new UI making the page easier to scan for the information you require.

Commit Message Now Available on New UI Jobs Page

What’s New

Commit messages are now displayed along with commit author on the Job page in the New UI.

Update Manual Activation CTA

What’s New

The button to manually add a config when starting a new project now reads “Use Existing Config”. Previously, this text read “Add Manually”. Through user research it was found that the new text directly encompasses many more use cases, including existing users with existing config ready to go.

Job Page Metadata Design Updates

What’s New

The metadata section at the top of the Job page has been reworked to better group related concepts and include new labelling. This redesign makes it more clear which link is for which feature, especially for those not familiar with icons for branch, commit, PR etc.

Pipelines Page Design Updates

What’s New

The Pipelines page has been redesigned to merge the Project and Pipeline number columns together and make the font smaller across the whole page. This change allows you to see more pipelines on the dashboard without scrolling.

Plan Overview and Usage UI Now Available to Non-Admins

What’s New

Non-admins can now see Plan Overview and Usage pages in the new UI.

Docker v19.03.12 Now Available for Remote Docker

What’s New

If you use Remote Docker in your Pipelines (setup_remote_docker) you now have the option of choosing Docker v19.03.12. For more information see the Discuss post. For usage information, and a full list of available versions see the Remote Docker Docs

Next-Gen Elixir Docker Convenience Image Now Available

What’s New

Next-gen Elixir docker image now available. For full details see the discuss post.

New Linux Machine Executor Image

What’s New

New Ubuntu 16.04-based machine executor image, ubuntu-1604:202007-01 now available. For full details see the discuss post. For usage information see the Configuration Reference.

Changes to Definition of Queued and Waiting in the New UI

What’s New

• Waiting indicates the time spent preparing a job to run due to Docker image choice and CircleCI infrastructure time.
• Queued indicates when you hit a concurrency plan limit, and your job isn’t running because other jobs in your organization are running first.

These two definitions were previously vice versa in the UI, which caused confusion due to discrepancies between usage in the UI and what most customers understood the terms to mean. We hope this change will avoid any confusion in future.

1-click Project Set Up

What’s New

You can now commit config directly from the Project Set-Up page to your repo with 1-click. The same config can also be downloaded and committed manually if preferred.

Container cgroup Limits Now Visible Inside the Docker Executor

What’s New

Container cgroup limits are now visible when using the Docker executor. This means that container-aware build tooling will now correctly detect the number of CPUs and amount of RAM available to the job.

You can also view these numbers directly by looking at the files in the /sys/fs/cgroup directory:

• /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu/cpu.shares
• /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu/cpu.cfs_quota_us
• /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu/cpu.cfs_period_us
• /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.limit_in_bytes

Plan Usage with New Compute Breakdown Tab Now in New UI

What’s New

The Plan Usage page in the new UI now includes a Compute tab, showing compute minutes and credits by executor type. You can also further filter the breakdown by projects. MacOS container plan users will also see overages within this tab.

If you are not currently on a usage plan, this page will show compute usage by credit and user to give an indication of what to expect on the usage plan.

Link to Changelog in Help Menu in New UI

What’s New

A link to the changelog is now on the Help menu, accessible from any core-app page.

Favicons Show Job Status in New UI

What’s New

Favicons for CircleCI job pages now reflect the status of the job. The icon becomes red for a failed job, green for success, and blue for still running.

Queue/Wait-Time Redesigned in the New UI

What’s New

Previously, queue and wait times were hidden behind an information icon hoover-over. They are now in their own section in the Job Details header. User-research showed these items were hard to find and folks did not like them being hidden.

Plan Overview Now Available in the New UI

What’s New

The new Plan overview page includes improved visualisations for credit usage, user seats and upgrade options. Access the Plan overview from the new UI sidebar.

CircleCI’s Next-Gen Rust Convenience Image has been Released

What’s New

image: cimg/rust:1.43.0

This is a direct replacement for the legacy CircleCI Rust image (circleci/rust). You can find this image on Docker Hub, and the source code & documentation on GitHub.

CircleCI’s Next-Gen Ruby Convenience Image has been Released

What’s New

image: cimg/ruby:2.6.5

This is a direct replacement for the legacy CircleCI Ruby image (circleci/ruby). You can find this image on Docker Hub, and the source code & documentation on GitHub.

Docker v19.03.8 Now Available via Remote Docker

What’s New

Docker v19.03.8 now available via Remote Docker (setup_remote_docker). Read more in the Discuss post and in the Docs Building Docker Images guide.

CircleCI’s next-gen OpenJDK convenience image has been released

What’s New

image: cimg/openjdk:14.0

This is a direct replacement for the legacy CircleCI OpenJDK image (circleci/openjdk). You can find this image on Docker Hub, and the source code & documentation on GitHub.

Advanced Logic in Config Now Available

What’s New

The new logic constructs allow for more powerful compilation-time decisions about which work to perform. Read more on our Discuss post.

CircleCI’s next-gen Go convenience image has been released

What’s New

image: cimg/go:1.13

This is a direct replacement for the legacy CircleCI Go image (circleci/golang). You can find this image on Docker Hub, and the source code & documentation on GitHub.

CircleCI’s Next-Gen Node Convenience Image has been Released

What’s New

image: cimg/node:12.16

This is a direct replacement for the legacy CircleCI Node image (circleci/node). You can find this image on Docker Hub, and the source code & documentation on GitHub.

Default Branch now Pinned to Top of Branch Selection Menu

What’s New

The default branch, usually master, is now pinned to the top of the branch selector list, as well as below in alphabetical order to prevent it being missed.

Type-To-Search Functionality Now Available for Projects Dropdown in the New UI

What’s New

You can now type to search for the project you need in the project selection dropdown on the Pipelines page.

Share and Transfer Plan Settings in New UI

What’s New

Roll out of the Share and Transfer Plan settings page has started in the new UI, making it easier for you to share, unshare and transfer plans.

Branch Filtering now available in New UI

What’s New

You can now type to search for the branch you need on the pipelines page.

Help Icon now in New UI

What’s New

There is now a “help” icon and button on the main navigation of the new UI. When expanded, this menu includes links to Docs, Discuss, Support, Premium Support, Orbs and Feature requests.

CircleCI Status Icon now in New UI

What’s New

The new UI now includes a link to the status site. In case of incidents, this icon will update to yellow (degraded), orange (parial outage) or red (outage).

New API v2 Job Approval Endpoint

What’s New

You can now approve jobs with API v2. The new endpoint is POST /api/v2/workflow/:workflow-id/approve/:approval-request-id. The approval request id is the ID of a pending approval job, which will also be returned as an approval_request_id on approval jobs returned by the API. For more information see the API v2 docs.

Config Editor with Linting on Project Setup

What’s New

The config editor available during project setup now visually display mistakes and offers suggestions specific to CircleCI’s configuration schema.

Xcode 11.5 Beta 1 Image Released

What’s New

Xcode 11.5 Beta 1 image has been released. Read more here.

Colorization of Step Output Returns to the New UI

What’s New

Colorized loading of step output has returned to the new UI on the Job Details page up to 6000 ANSI words.

New Machine Executor Image with Docker 19.03

What’s New

A new Machine executor image ubuntu-1604:201903-01 is now availabe, with Docker 19.03 pre-installed. See this Discuss post for the list of the versions of core software also available in this image. Check out the Machine executor docs for instructions on how to use this image with the Machine executor.

Slack Orb integration is Back in New UI Project Settings

What’s New

Slack has been a powerful way for orgs to get status updates and custom alerts. We’ve brought it back in the new UI under Project Settings to aid users to solve their problems more efficiently while remaining in their Slack workflow.

Tests Run/Failed Displayed in Tab

What’s New

The Test Summary tab on the Job Details page in the New UI now displays green when tests pass, and red for failures. The number of tests run, or number of failed tests is also displayed.

Recent and Failed Pipelines Auto-Open in New UI

What’s New

When viewing the Pipelines page, the most recent pipeline and any failed pipelines will be auto expanded to show the jobs that ran. This gives a quicker route to accessing job step output.

Max Parallelism Now Displayed in New UI

What’s New

Previously, the number of parallel runs in use was displayed, now both this and the maximum available are shown. You can also hover over the adjacent information icon for further information.

Xcode 11.4 Image Updated

What’s New

Xcode 11.4 image has been updated. Read more [here]https://discuss.circleci.com/t/xcode-11-4-updated-image/35474).

Page Load Time Improvements on the New UI Job Page

What’s New

We have decreased the first meaningful paint time down to 1.96 seconds and improved load-time perception for the job detail page in the new UI.

RAM Disks

What’s New

We are now making a RAM disk available for our Docker executor at /mnt/ramdisk. This has the potential to significantly speed up certain types of build. For usage, please check the docs.

Artifacts Redirects

What’s New

All non-HTML build artifacts on CircleCI now redirect to short-lived pre-signed cloud storage URLs. This change has been made to improve the performance of our artifacts hosting.

If you are using a web browser to view HTML resources, such as test/coverage reports or download tarballs/zip files, you will not need to change anything.

If you are using curl or another HTTP client that does not follow redirects by default, you will need to enable redirect support. For curl, you will need to add an -L flag. Please check the docs for more information.

Job Approval from the Pipelines List in New UI

What’s New

You can now manually unblock an approval job from the Pipelines List page in the new UI. Originally this functionality was only availble from the Workflows map. Read more about approval jobs here.

Matrix Job Support

What’s New

The new matrix stanza allows you to run a parameterized job multiple times with different arguments. Read more about matrix jobs here.

Xcode 11.4 GM Image Released

What’s New

Xcode 11.4 (GM) image is released. Read more here.

Email Notification for Scheduled Workflows

What’s New

If any of your scheduled workflows become unscheduled for any reason, you will now be notified by email.

URL for Onboarding Pages Updated

What’s New

URLs for onboarding pages have been consolidated for security and improved usability. They now follow this structure:

• Root page: https://app.circleci.com/projects
• Project Dashboard: https://app.circleci.com/projects/project-dashboard/:vcs/:org-name:/
• Project Set Up: https://app.circleci.com/projects/project-setup/:vcs/:org-name/:project-name

URL for Settings Pages Updated in the New UI

What’s New

URLs for Settings pages have been consolidated for security and improved usability. They now follow this structure:

• User settings: https://app.circleci.com/settings/user
• Project settings: https://app.circleci.com/settings/project/:vcs/:org-name/:project-name
• Organization settings: https://app.circleci.com/settings/organization/:vcs/:org-name

Scheduled Workflows Now Shown as Pipelines

What’s New

Scheduled workflows are now available as pipelines in both the new UI, and the API.

Autocommit and Config Editor Now Live

What’s New

Autocommit is a new feature that allows you to commit a sample language-specific config direct to a new branch on your repo when adding a project, making it even quicker to start building on CircleCI. You can also edit the config prior to committing. These features are in addition to the option to manually commit a config file.

Dynamic Language Sidebar on Project Setup

What’s New

When adding a new project to CircleCI, the project dashboard sidebar now dynamically displays language-specific docs and guides to help you get started quickly and get the most out of the service.

Queue Time and Wait Time Now Available in the New UI

What’s New

Wait and queue times can now be accessed for each job in the new UI. Hover over the i next to the Duration at the top of the job details page, and the wait time and queue time appear as a tooltip. This information has been added to the new UI to make it easier to get information on edge-case failures in your pipelines.

Updated URL Structure for New UI

What’s New

The new UI URL sub-domain structure has been updated for improved security and usability. The new structure makes it easier for developers to interact with URLs like breadcrumb items.

Xcode 11.4 Beta 3 Image Now Available

What’s New

Read more in our Xcode 11.4 Beta 3 image announcement.

Legacy Jobs View Now Available in New UI

What’s New

The Legacy Jobs view in the new UI provides an overview for all jobs, regardless of whether they have pipeline processing enabled. We are aiming to move all customers over to pipeline processing, and this view has been added to provide the information you need for all projects during this transition period. Access the Legacy Jobs view at the end of the Pipelines List page.

March Docker Convenience Image Updates

What’s New

Read the March update on CircleCI Docker Convenience Images here.

Administrator Permissions Changes

What’s New

CircleCI is making changes for a stricter permissions access. Going forward only GitHub administrators will be able to view and access the following pages in the CircleCI application:

• Plan overview
• Plan usage
• Share & Transfer
• Projects
• VCS
• Security

Note: This does not affect Bitbucket users.

Read more and give feedback on our Discuss post.

Manage Contexts With the CLI

What’s New

You can now show, create, delete and list Contexts via the CircleCI CLI. Run circleci update to get access to this new Context functionality.

New UI navigational breadcrumb Now Includes Project and Branch Name

What’s New

Project and branch names are now included in the navigational breadcrumb trail in the new UI, placing essential pipeline information in view and making it quicker and easier to navigate to the pages you need.

Improved Artifacts Hosting

What’s New

The way build artifacts are hosted is changing to improve performance. Read our Discuss post for further details.

Pipelines Functionality Rollout

What’s New

From March 9, 2020, CircleCI will begin to enable pipelines for all projects. A pipeline contains all of the workflows (and the jobs inside those workflows) that CircleCI runs after a trigger on your project. A pipeline can be triggered by a pull request, a commit, or even an API call. Read more on our Discuss post.

Find (CMD+F) Now Working in the New UI

What’s New

As we build the new UI, faster page-load is important to us. We initially built the Step Output section to load with react-virtualized, meaning that only the visible rows were rendered. This allowed us to show colorized output with an even faster load/scrolling time than the old UI. In theory it was brilliant, in practice it broke the ability to use native browser search tools like CMD+F to find specific words before or after the rendered text. During user research, we watched many CircleCI users attempt to CMD+F in the Step Output, and not find what we were looking for. As a result we pulled out react-virtualized and enhanced colorized output from the step output. Color we can compromise on, usability we cannot.

Resource Class Now Available in New UI

What’s New

Resource type and class is now displayed in the new UI for each job. This helps customers optimize pipelines, debug runs that fail due to lack of resources, and identify projects that could build faster with a different resource class.

API v2 Insights Endpoints Available at Job Level

What’s New

Get job run data, including status, credits, and duration, for each individual job within a workflow. More info here.

Project Setting Now Live in the New UI

What’s New

The redesigned Project Settings page is now available in the new UI. Change SSH keys, Environment variables, API permissions, JIRA integrations, and more.

February Docker Convenience Images Updates

What’s New

Next-generation Go image, and new base image are now stable. Read more on the Discuss post.

Machine XL, Machine 2XL, Windows 2XL Resources Now Available on Performance Plan

What’s New

The following resource classes are now available to customers on the Performance plan: XL and 2XL for the Machine executor, and 2XL for the Windows executor.

Deploy to Windows Containers with the Updated Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Orb

What’s New

With this update, CircleCI users can deploy directly from their CI/CD pipeline to Windows containers. Read Google’s announcement here.

Visit the GKE orb page for more information.

Xcode 11.3.1 available on CircleCI

What’s New

Customers on the Performance plan and macOS plan can now build using Xcode 11.3.1. See our iOS documentation for the details of software installed in this new image.

Organization Settings Now Available in the New UI

What’s New

The Organization Settings page in the New UI is now live. Organization Settings include contexts, environment variables, security permissions, and VCS integrations.

Latest Commit Message Now Available in New UI

What’s New

The latest commit message for each pipline is now visible on the Pipelines overview page to make identification easier.

API v2 is Live

What’s New

API v2 enables new functionality, such as triggering and retrieving pipelines and workflows via the API. Read more about it in our blog post.

Page Through Older Pipelines in New UI

What’s New

You can now page through older Pipelines using the See More button at the bottom of the Pipelines Page in the new UI. Up until now only the last 20 Pipelines were available. Please note that due to API contraints, paging through older Pipelines will disable the live update of currently running Pipelines on the page.

Branch and My Pipelines Filters Now Available in New UI

What’s New

Branch and “My Pipelines” filter options are now available in the new UI. Both are easily accessible at the top of the Pipelines page. Filter options now include:

• Org switcher
• Pipelines switcher, which has two options – All Pipelines / My Pipelines
• Branch filter, which opens a drop down to choose between displaying pipelines for an individual branch, or all branches.

Workflow Rerun and Cancel Now Available in New UI

What’s New

You can now cancel and rerun workflows from the Workflow Detail page. Previously this functionality was only available from the Job Detail page. This change was made after data analysis indicated that most users were rerunning workflows from the workflow level rather than the job level on the old UI.

Transferring Plans Now Works for Performance Plan

What’s New

We have fixed a bug that was preventing folks on Performance Plans from transfering ownership to another plan. Please note only org admins can transfer plans.

Manual Approval Functionality Available in the New UI

What’s New

Manual approval of hold jobs is now fully functional in the new UI. To approve a job, click the name of your workflow from either the Job Detail page breadcrumb, or the Pipelines List page to navigate to the Workflow Map. You will see the approval job has a purple status icon. Click the job and a button will pop-up to confirm approval.

New Ways to try Pipelines on a Branch

What’s New

You can now try out Pipelines on an individual branch before switching your whole project over. There are two ways to try this — 1) If you use config version 2.1 your run will now automatically trigger a pipeline. 2) If you want to keep your version 2 config you can use a new key pipelines under experimental in your config.yml it would look like the following:

experimental: 
  pipelines: true

New Compatibility Options for CIRCLE_COMPARE_URL

What’s New

Version 2 config with pipelines enabled will now automatically have the CIRCLE_COMPARE_URL injected into the job configuration. Previously, if you referenced CIRCLE_COMPARE_URL in a version 2 config, then turned on pipelines, it would disappear. This fixes that issue. For version 2.1 config we do not automatically inject CIRCLE_COMPARE_URL. Instead, we have exposed metadata about the pipeline for you to use more granularly. Mosts users end up parsing out CIRCLE_COMPARE_URL, so instead we did that work for you. In version 2.1 config you can now do the following:

version: 2.1
jobs:
  my-job:
    environment:
      CIRCLE_COMPARE_URL: << pipeline.project.git_url >>/compare/<< pipeline.git.base_revision >>..<<pipeline.git.revision>>

Pipeline Values Now Available in your Configuration

What’s New

New pipeline metadata values can be referenced in your 2.1 configuration. Unlike CIRCLE_ environment values, these pipeline values are available at config processing time, so you could choose to use them in your configuration superstructure outside of jobs. For example, you could use pipeline values as strings for your working_directory or your image key under a job. Read more in our Pipeline Variables guide.

Workflows Graph Now Available in the New UI

What’s New

The workflows graph is now available in the new UI, with improvements in the way job connectivity is displayed, compared to the old workflows graph. This core feature displays a visual representation of how jobs fit together within your workflow.

All Rerun Options are Now Available in the New UI

What’s New

All rerun options - Rerun Workflow, Rerun Workflow from Failed, and Rerun Job with SSH – are now available from the Job Details page in the new UI.

Secret Masking Enabled for All

What’s New

Secret masking has now been enabled for 100% of our customers. To read more about the new secret masking feature, read our blog post.

Configuration Now Available in New UI

What’s New

You can now access your configuration files, both pre-processing and post-processing, from the new UI, when opted in. The config file links are available from both the Job Details page at the top right, and the Pipelines list page via the 3-dot drop-down menu.

Automatic opt-in to new UI

What’s New

After loads of great feedback we have determined our Job Details page in the new UI now adds far more value than the old UI equivalent. We are beginning to automatically opt-in customers who will benefit most from the new view – those who primarily use the Job Details page (as opposed to needing the Workflows Map). A welcome message will be displayed on arrival and you can opt-out at any time.

MacOS 10.15 Catalina image and Xcode 11.2 Beta 2 is Released

What’s New

We’ve released our first macOS 10.15 Catalina image along with Xcode 11.2 Beta 2. Read our discuss post for more on highlights and usage.

User Settings Now Available on New UI

What’s New

You will soon be able to access User Settings from within the new UI experience when opted in. Everyone will have access by the end of next week. Just click on your profile icon at the bottom of the left-hand panel to view User Settings.

Usage-Based Pricing is now Live

What’s New

CircleCI’s new usage-based pricing scheme expands your capabilities to optimize and scale CI/CD pipelines. Eliminate queuing, get full access to resources, optimize your compute power, while only paying for what you use. Read about our new pricing model and learn more about usage-based pricing in our blog post.

Change to Seat Blocking for OSS Builds

What’s New

If you are running OSS builds, you may continue doing so, even if all user seats are filled.

Performance Plan Refill Changes

What’s New

If you are on the Performance Plan, you will start to see refill amounts changing at the next billing date. Based on feedback about a high number of charges for refills, the refill amount has been increased from 10% to 25%. The refill will automatically be attempted when the plan reaches 10% of credits remaining.

Windows Now Available in Free Plan

What’s New

If you are on a CircleCI Free plan, you may now access the Windows compute type. To access Windows, add the specification in your .circleci/config.yml file. Refer to the Hello World Windows document for instructions.

New UI Availability and Rerun with SSH

What’s New

• Experimental UI now available to everyone

To try it out, Enable Pipelines in your Project Settings and then click the opt-in banner available on any Job Detail page. We are actively monitoring feedback and bug reports through a poll that appears in the app. The data and commentary we receive directly impacts what we build next, so opt-in to be a part of making CircleCI better!

• Rerun with SSH available on experimental new UI

Rerun with SSH, the top new requested feature from in-app feedback from new UI users, is now available. We are rolling out this feature slowly to monitor for bugs, but we are excited to honor the feedback.

Xcode 11.0 and 11.1 available on CircleCI

What’s New

Customers on the Performance plan and macOS plan can now build using Xcode 11.0 (as of Sep 20th) and Xcode 11.1 (as of Sep 26th). Please see our iOS documentation for the details of software installed in these new images.

New UI Updates

What’s New

• Cancel Button in the New UI For users opted-in to the New UI experience, jobs can now be cancelled from the Job Detail page.

• New Navigation System in the New UI Previously, the Pipelines page was only available from the breadcrumb on the Jobs page, or through the URL. A new central navigation system now appears on the left-hand side of the screen with a Projects menu on the Pipelines page.

New Command to List and Unlist Orbs

What’s New

To unlist your published orbs from the registry, use the new circleci orb unlist CLI command. For details, refer to the help page. Unlisted orbs remain world-readable when referenced by name but will not appear in the search results of the orb registry. Unlisted orbs can be listed again using the circleci orb unlist <namespace/orb> false command.

Plan Usage Page Updates

What’s New

For Free plans, the Plan Usage page has been updated to provide you with more visibility into how you’re using the product. The total number of build minutes and users now appears on the along with the breakdown of usage by projects and a list of users for each month.

Build minutes and corresponding credits were also added to the page to help you understand your credit usage if you choose to upgrade to the Performance plan.

Streamlined macOS Image Delivery

What’s New

We know how painful it is to have delays in Xcode image availability. We’ve been working to reduce the often 2-3 week delay as we validate security, availability, and performance in our release process. We are now down to under 3 days on the last four releases and expect this trend to continue.

Artifacts in new UI

What’s New

You can now find Artifacts the new UI Job Details page. We started with a flat list after numerous customer interviews. It’s no surprise that “find” is our friend. We will eventually build a search bar to filter artifacts - but hey, cntrl-f is easy. Please give it a whirl and share your feedback.

Job Details Page Updates

What’s New

Select users with pipelines enabled on their projects will see a banner on the Job Details page that enables opt-in to the experimental new UI as it is being built. This new UI includes the following:

• Improved organization of the Jobs page
• An option to open a specific step in a new tab
• Replacement for the current dashboard that lists recent Pipeline runs

Read more information in the Discuss post.

Windows support now available on CircleCI

What’s New

CircleCI customers on Performance plans can now run jobs on Windows Server 2019 with popular dependencies— .NET support, Visual Studio, Windows SDK, Docker for Windows, as well as cross-platform workspaces, and caches. Learn more about Windows support here.

Plan Overview Page Updates

What’s Fixed

Invoiced Linux container plan customers will see their plan properly listed as Manually Invoiced on the Plan Overview page.

Enforcement of Available Seats in Plan

What’s New

When no additional user seats are left in your plan, new users will be blocked from initiating jobs.

The Plan Usage page has also been updated to include Unregistered user (previously Guest user) and Scheduled workflow in your user list if you are initiating jobs usging scheduled workflows.

FREE minutes shift to 250/week

What’s New

FREE minutes shift to 250/week

Customers on FREE plans will notice a change in how their monthly minutes are allocated. Customers will retain 1,000 FREE minutes per month and will receive them in increments of 250 minutes per week. This will allow customers to budget credits in a more manageable way while aligning with a Mon - Fri work week.

Performance Plan Seat Allotment Alert

What’s New

Performance Plan customers will now be alerted when they have used up their user seat allotment. These customers will need to update their subscription to allow all of their team members to use CircleCI.

Restricted Contexts

What’s New

CircleCI enables you to restrict environment variables at run time by adding security groups to contexts. Security groups are definied as GitHub teams. After a security group is added to a context, only members of that security group who are also CircleCI users may access or use the environment variables of the context. See the Restricting a Context documentation for details.

New Status Gauge Icon

What’s New

In an effort to improve incident reporting, CircleCI replaced status banners with a gauge icon in the application.
Our goal is to provide you with a better understanding of your pipeline’s current system health which includes CircleCI infrastructure and common external dependencies. Before, banners hid root cause and communicated issues to everyone even though the incident was relevant to few. Now, a gauge icon will give you a dynamic view into general infrastructure health and fast access to https://status.circleci.com for deeper details.

New Privacy Setting

What’s New

CircleCI uses 3rd-party tracking pixels to analyze traffic and optimize our marketing efforts (read our privacy policy to learn more). You can now disable these pixels within the CircleCI application by opting out. To do this, click the drop down menu under your picture and follow User Settings > Privacy & Security to check the opt-out box.

New SSH Key Error Message

What’s New

An error message is now returned if adding an SSH key fails.

Getting Started Page Changes

What’s New

Projects are no longer checked by default on the Getting Started page to avoid causing all unintended projects to start building.

Orb Licensing

What’s New

Orbs are now licensed out from CircleCI to users under the MIT open-source license agreement. Refer to the Licensing page of the Orbs Registry for details.

Plan Display Updates (February 2019)

What’s New

• Usage banner is now shown on non-job pages to help users of the Free plan understand their usage.

What’s Fixed

• Added back ability to start a macOS trial on Plan Settings page.

Performance Improvement

What’s New

For customers with many branches, the branch picker will now load only a subset of branches to improve performance.

What’s Fixed

Insights tab will now load properly when visiting from jobs, workflows, or settings tabs.

Log Downloads Feature

What’s New

For customers with large logs, there’s now a way to open the log file in a separate browser in addition to to downloading the file.

Plan Display Updates (December 2018)

What’s New

• Plan Usage now shows the number of DLC projects and Active Users for the billing period for Performance customers.

What’s Fixed

• For customers on Manually Invoiced OSX plan, your plan type will now properly display on the Plan Overview page.

Orbs List Update

What’s New

It is now possible to sort the list of orbs according to their usage by running the circleci orb list --sort command.

Usage Warning Fix

What’s Fixed

The usage warning banner for Free users has been updated to exclude build minutes from OSS projects.

My Branches Fix

What’s Fixed

The My Branches button on the Jobs or Workflows pages has been fixed to display all relevant branches.

Orbs Inside Orbs

What’s New

Orb elements can now be composed directly with elements of other orbs. For example, you can now have an orb that looks like the following:

orbs:

  some-orb: some-ns/some-orb@volatile

executors:

  my-executor: some-orb/their-executor

commands:

  my-command: some-orb/their-command

jobs:

  my-job: some-orb/their-job

  another-job:

    executor: my-executor

    steps:

      - my-command

          param1: "hello"

Insights and Workflows Improvements

What’s Fixed

• Insights now supports branch names with slashes in them.
• Workflows list page now supports displaying git tags.

Xcode 10.1 Image Availability

What’s New

• Xcode 10.1 macOS image has been released for CircleCI.
• Select the image by adding the following to a job in your .circleci/config.yml file:

macos:
  xcode: 10.1.0

• Xcode is now version 10.1 Build 10B61.
• The Command Line Tools are now version 10.1.
• This image upgrades to the latest macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G3025).
• This image removes the simulators for WatchOS 4.2.
• The system Ruby is unchanged at 2.3.7p456, but Ruby 2.4.5 and 2.5.3 are now available by using chruby.
• This image removes the additional Ruby 2.3.7 that was available to chruby.
• NodeJS is now version 11.0.0
• Yarn is now 1.12.1.

Workflow Notifications

What’s New

• Basic workflow notifications are now available.
• If you have workflows configured as part of your project, you will start receiving workflow-level email notifications.
• Refer to the Notifications document for details.

CircleCI is 33% Faster

What’s New

• CircleCI infrastructure upgrades have improved build times by 33%.
• The free tier will change from 1500 to 1000 minutes on December 1st, 2018.
• Notifications have been updated reflect the 1,000-minute free plan, so you can project your future usage needs.

CircleCI Orbs General Availability

What’s New

Orbs are packages of CircleCI configuration shared across projects. Orbs help you simplify YAML configuration, enable you to build on top of CircleCI, and support sharing of standardized configurations across your projects.

This release provides you with access to certified orbs for AWS CodeDeploy, Rollbar, Artifactory, CodeCov, Heroku, Slack and more. You can also create and publish your own orbs using the CircleCI CLI. Refer to the CircleCI Orbs Registry for the complete list of certified orbs.

To learn about using and creating orbs, see the following documentation:

• Introduction to Orbs
• Using Orbs
• Creating Orbs
• Orbs FAQs

GitHub Checks is now supported

What’s New

• CircleCI now integrates with the GitHub Checks API, so you can see the status of your CircleCI workflows under the Pull Request Checks tab in the GitHub UI. For more information, see CircleCI Docs.

New Docs Search and Org Switcher Update

What’s New

• The Documentation search bar has been completely redesigned and improved to provide a full page of aggregate results, see CircleCI Docs.

• The Org Switcher was updated to fix a display issue that caused users to be redirected to the wrong organization.

New Orb CLI Commands, New Plan Views, New API Doc

What’s New

• The CircleCI CLI command orb list now has an optional flag, --json, that provides machine-readable output. In addition, the CLI command orb source has been updated to allow you to pull any version, including dev versions, for example:

circleci orb source mynamespace/myorb@dev:foo
circleci orb source mynamespace/myorb@1.2.3
circleci orb source mynamespace/myorb@volatile

• Cloud Performance plans have been updated to display multiple periods of usage data on the Settings page.

• The CircleCI API documentation has been re-published with a completely new design and updated content, see the API Reference.

Reusable Commands and Executors, Xcode 10 Image, and macOS Plan Settings Updates

What’s New

• CircleCI 2.1 config keys are now available for reusing commands, executors, and parameters to simplify your .circleci/config.yml file. See the Reusing Config document for examples and instructions. Refer to the Configuring CircleCI reference for 2.1 syntax requirements.

• We have released the Xcode 10 image on CircleCI 2.0. Add the following to your .circleci/config.yml file to select that version of Xcode in your jobs:

  macos:
  xcode: "10.0.0"
  

Note: A known issue, for which a fix is in-progress, prevents shipping iOS apps built on the Xcode 10 image to the App Store.

• For Cloud Container macOS plans, there is an improved flow for adding containers on the Plan Overview page. This can be found under Settings > Plan Overview.

New Project Default, Switch CLI Prompt, Plan Updates, and Disabled Fixed Notification

What’s New

• New projects are now created with 2.0 config by default and have Build Processing enabled.

• CLI users are now prompted to switch to the updated CLI. All commands are backwards compatible, however some have been officially renamed. For example, the circleci build command is now an alias for the circleci local execute command.

• For Performance Plans, total build minutes and credit usage for top projects is now displayed on the Plan Usage page. This can be found under Settings > Plan Usage

• For Linux Plans, there is an improved path for adding containers on the Plan Overview page. This can be found under Settings > Plan Overview

• Disabled Fixed notification through email or chat, if you have defined workflows as part of your configuration.

Jobs Page Rerun Workflow button, EOL 1.0, and CircleCI Docs Menu Updates

What’s New

• A Rerun workflow from beginning button is now on the Jobs page.

• A 1.0 Project Badge for all projects still building on CircleCI 1.0 appears on Github.

• Builds for new projects now require a CircleCI 2.0 config. 1.0 builds are no longer available for new projects. Builds for new projects without a 2.0 config will be blocked.

• Updated error message when builds are not run if free minutes are depleted.

• Updated information architecture with redesigned Welcome page and navigation menu for CircleCI Documentation is now available.

Auto-Cancel Workflow Builds, Updated CLI, and Plans Page Updates

What’s New

• Auto-cancel of redundant builds now supports workflows. Customers will need to turn on the Build Processing option under Advanced Settings in their project settings. See the istructions for Enabling Auto-Cancel for Workflows Triggered by pushed to GItHub or the API for details.

• A new version of the Local CLI is available. Customers using the existing Local CLI can update using the circleci-update command followed by the circleci switch command. Refer to Using the CircleCI Local CLI for the update instructions.

• Performance customers can now see the billing period dates on the Plan Overview page.

• A new Plan Overview page that shows the details for plan selection and a new Plan Usage page that shows usages for any applicable Linux and macOS plan.

Performance Plan Overview Includes Number of Projects with DLC Enabled

What’s New

• Performance customers can now see the number of active projects with DLC enabled on the Plan Overview page.

Enable Build Processing, New API Endpoint for Triggering Projects with Workflows, and Performance Fix

What’s New

• It is possible to trigger workflows with the CircleCI API using a new endpoint. See the Trigger a Build by Project section of the CircleCI API Projects Documentation.
  • You must go to your Project Settings in the CircleCI app to Enable Build Processing (preview) as a prerequisite for using this endpoint.
  • IMPORTANT – This endpoint does not yet support the build_parameters options that the job-triggering endpoint supports.
  • You may safely go back by disabling the radio button for this feature on your Advanced Settings for your project if jobs or workflows fail the new build processing.

Resolved Issues

• Resolved a known performance issue which caused a frozen page for organizations with many branches.

Workflows Improvements, Active Users View, and Alerts

What’s New

• The Workflows page of the CircleCI app now displays the username associated with rerunning a workflow, approving a job, or cancelling a job.

• Performance improvements were made for workflows pages that reduce the load time for all workflows pages.

• Custom Performance Plans now appear with active users for the month on the Plan Overview page.

• Alerts for users who have depleted the free Linux build minutes for the month.

Xcode 9.4.1, Plan Overview page updates, and Bug Fixes

What’s New

• The Xcode 9.4.1 image was released on CircleCI 2.0. To select version 9.4.1 for a job, add the following to your .circleci/config.yml file:

        macos:
          xcode: "9.4.1"

• If you are on the Performance Plan, you can now view available credits on the Plan Overview page of your Organization Settings in the CircleCI app.

Updates

• Fixed a known issue with the CircleCI workflows UI due to . period character in the workflows name.

• Fixed the interaction of the Workflows Rerun dropdown menu by restricting to open-source project users who are part of a GitHub organization.

Build Service and Config as Code

What’s New

Preview of improved builds service

CircleCI has developed an improved builds service that is ready for preview. The improved build service is the first step to a healthy roadmap of parameterized commands, config reuse across projects, improved DRY support, and better error reporting.

A preview is currently available for a few of our most adventurous organizations this week, and we plan on rolling it out to more projects in the coming weeks before it is publicly available. If you are adventurous and want to switch to the new service, be sure to read the preview docs before requesting approval.

Improved Config Schema Error Transparency

What’s New

With 2.0 you can do a lot more with the config.yml file. However, there are those times when edits result in schema errors. The CircleCI config processor now creates and returns a specialized Job that references the specific schema error(s) in the Job list. Learn more about our recent move to the terms Workflow and Job.

Support for Test Splitting with Workflows

What’s New

The following features and additions are now available.

• New Workflows Feature: If your project has a large number of tests, you can use the circleci tests split command to reduce your job run time. This feature is now supported with Workflows. For more information on how to set up test splitting, see the Splitting Test Files section of the Running Tests in Parallel documentation.

• EOL Tools: The 1.0 migration center has been updated with additional content and helpful tools.

• Performance Improvement: CircleCI has upgraded the mechanism that returns gettimeofday calls. As a result, heavy users of syscall will see an aggregate improvement in performance. Most noticeably this will improve the run time of projects with heavy usage of profiling tools and Xdebug with PHP.

• Added: This release adds a Plan Overview page for customers on the Performance pricing plan to enable Admins to see their selection from the Settings.

• Added: Customers who are still building on CircleCI 1.0 will now get a reminder to upgrade to CircleCI 2.0 in build emails.

Xcode 9.3 available on CircleCI 2.0 for macOS

We have released the Xcode 9.3 image on CircleCI 2.0. Add the following to your .circleci/config.yml file to select that version of Xcode in your jobs:

macos:
  xcode: "9.3.0"

Support for Multiple Contexts

It is now possible to create multiple Contexts in the Organization Settings of the CircleCI app. See the Contexts documentation for details and naming conventions.

Xcode 9.2 available on CircleCI 2.0 for macOS

We have released the Xcode 9.2 image on CircleCI 2.0. Add the following to your .circleci/config.yml file to select that version of Xcode in your jobs:

macos:
  xcode: "9.2.0"

CircleCI 2.0 for macOS General Availability

The release of CircleCI 2.0 for macOS enables your iOS projects to benefit from the significant performance, stability, and reliability improvements in the CircleCI 2.0 platform, including the following new features:

Workflows: Orchestrate jobs and steps with great flexibility using a simple set of new keys in your configuration. Increase the development speed through faster feedback, shorter reruns, and more efficient use of resources.

Advanced caching: Speed up builds by caching files from run to run using keys that are easy to control with granular caching options for cache save and restore points throughout your jobs. Cache any files from run to run using keys you can control.

Get started with the complete set of documentation for the macOS platform:

• Migrating Your iOS Project From 1.0 to 2.0
• iOS Project Tutorial
• Testing iOS Applications on macOS
• Setting Up Code Signing for iOS Projects

Docker Layer Caching in Machine Executor

Docker Layer Caching is now available as a premium feature for the machine executor. Refer to the Docker layer Caching in Machine Executor section for instructions.

Rerun Button Change on the Jobs Page

The button on the Jobs page has changed for jobs that run as part of a workflow. The rebuild options that are not compatible with Workflows have been removed from the button on the Jobs page. Jobs that ran as part of a workflow will only include the Rerun Job with SSH button on the Jobs page.

To rerun a job that ran as part of a workflow, you must navigate to the Workflows page of the CircleCI application and either rerun your entire Workflow or rerun your Workflow from failed jobs.

Scheduled Workflows

This feature enables Workflows to run on a configurable schedule. Refer to the Scheduling a Workflow section of the Orchestrating Workflows document for instructions and examples. Reference information for syntax is available in the triggers section of the Writing Jobs With Steps document and answers to common questions are documented in the Workflows section of the Migration FAQ.

Xcode 9 available on CircleCI for macOS

Today we updated our Xcode 9.0 image with the just released Xcode 9.0 GM Seed (build version 9A235). Please check out this post on our Discuss site for more details on how to use the latest Xcode in your macOS builds.

Minutes Used in Your Plan

This feature adds the used minutes to your Org Settings > Plan Settings page. This feature displays used minutes against Linux machines. It expands on our current functionality which shows minutes used against OS X machines and is located on the same page: Org Settings > Plan Settings.

Data appears for Orgs with a billing date after Aug 31, 2017. So, a new org will immediately see minutes used, and existing orgs will see the minutes used appear within the coming 30 days, depending on the billing date for your plan.

Workflows Graph

This feature enables an interactive graph of your workflow configuration. Refer to the instructions and examples in the Orchestrating Workflows document.

Xcode 9.0 Beta 5

Today we updated our Xcode 9.0 beta 3 image to Xcode 9.0 beta 5 (build version 9M202q) with the latest simulators.

You can use this image by specifying Xcode 9.0 in your circle.yml:

machine:
  xcode:
    version: "9.0"

This image tag will be automatically upgraded when new betas are released by Apple, until the final release of Xcode 9.

Contexts

This feature enables sharing of global environment variables across projects. Refer to the instructions and examples in the Setting Contexts document and the Job Contexts Example section of Orchestrating Workflows.

CircleCI 2.0 Git Tags Support

This feature enables filtering on Git tags for jobs in workflows using CircleCI 2.0. CircleCI will not run a job for a Git tag unless a tags filter is specified. Refer to the instructions and examples in the Workflow Tags section of Writing Jobs With Steps and in the Git Tag Job Execution section of Orchestrating Workflows.

CircleCI 2.0 General Availability

CircleCI 2.0 is a completely updated CI/CD platform that starts every run with a clean image which is automatically provisioned just-in-time for Linux and Android jobs on the hosted CircleCI application.

Configuration moves into the code in 2.0, so every developer can configure jobs directly in their working branch, teams can try new things without the risk of slowing anyone else down, and business leaders have the ability to operate large global teams with minimal overhead. CircleCI 2.0 prevents you from writing clean-up scripts because every run starts in the same state, eliminating the risk of polluting a test database or leaving files in places that cause problems for the next run.

The CircleCI 2.0 platform includes significant performance, stability, and reliability improvements along with the following new features:

• First-class Docker Support: Choose any image to run your job steps, customizable on a per-job basis on a particular Git branch. Speed up your run times with advanced layer caching. Build docker images with full docker CLI support and full support for docker compose. Support for all programming languages and custom environments that offer more predictable output. See Specifying Container Images for instructions.

• Workflows: Orchestrate jobs and steps with great flexibility using a simple set of new keys in your configuration. Share temporary files between jobs with workspaces for fan-in, fan-out, parallel, and sequential runs. Hold a workflow for a manual approval and restart a workflow from a failed job. See Orchestrating Workflows for details.

• Resource Allocation: Configure your CPU and RAM needs on a per-job basis at the branch level, see the resource_class documentation for instructions. Paid accounts may request this feature from their Customer Success Manager, non-paid users may request to get started by sending email to support@circleci.com.

• Insights: Access interactive charts and analyses in seconds. Visualize trends in your build history to identify and pinpoint bottlenecks. Understand all of your builds at a glance. View the builds that fail most, so you can fix the slowest tests to improve efficiency. See the Collecting Test Metadata documentation for information.

• Debugging with SSH and CLI: Perform local job runs, configuration validation and SSH in to builds for access to log files and debugging running processes. See Using the CLI documentation to learn about running local jobs and refer to Debugging Jobs over SSH for SSH instructions.

• Parallelism: Automatic provisioning of containers as they are freed without waiting for other jobs to finish. See the Parallel Job Execution documentation for examples.

• Advanced Caching: Speed up builds by caching files from run to run using keys that are easy to control with granular caching options for cache save and restore points throughout your jobs. Cache any files from run to run using keys you can control, see the Caching Dependencies documentation for strategies and steps.

• Demonstration Applications: See the Language Guides and Demo Repos to learn CircleCI configuration by example for applications written in Go, Javascript, PHP, Python (Django and Flask), Ruby on Rails, Java, Elixir, and Clojure.

• New Documentation: New and restructured documentation including an Overview, Hello World, Sample 2.0 config.yml File, simplified instructions for Migrating from 1.0 to 2.0, plus examples for Configuring Databases and Creating Custom Docker Images. Refer to the Migration FAQ for common questions and known limitations.

Pricing Plan Change

A fix to the pricing plan has been implemented which limits Linux plan capacity to the published maximum. As a result of this change, you may see builds queuing until the requisite containers are available.

CircleCI 2.0 Core Dump Support

This feature enables core dumps for projects using CircleCI 2.0. Get core dump files and push them as artifacts for inspection and debugging using the instructions in the Uploading Build Artifacts document.

Xcode 9 Beta 2

Today we updated our Xcode 9.0 beta image to Xcode 9.0 beta 2 with the latest 10.2 simulators. To start using it, add the following to your circle.yml:

  xcode:
    version: "9.0"

This image tag will be upgraded automatically when new betas are released by Apple, until the final release of Xcode 9.

Xcode 8.3.3

For mobile, we have just released a build image that allows you to use the latest stable version of Xcode, 8.3.3. To start using it, add the following to your circle.yml:

  xcode:
    version: "8.3.3"

Workflows

The Workflows feature is available on CircleCI 2.0. It is designed with a flexible algorithm to support very complex job scheduling and orchestration using a simple set of new configuration keys. See the Steps to Configure Workflows section of the Migrating from 1.0 to 2.0 document for instructions. Refer to the Orchestrating Workflows document for examples and conceptual information.

Xcode 9 Beta 1 Availability

This update makes Xcode 9 Beta available for all macOS builds. Specify version 9.0 in your circle.yml file to override the default.

Authenticate With Google

This feature enables users to log in to CircleCI with a Google account and provides new users with the opportunity to experience the application and selected demo projects without providing access to their code repository.

Filter Build Emails by Project

Now you can filter your build emails by project without doing subject matching. This feature adds the standard List-ID header with organisation.project.notifications.circleci.com to make it easy to filter build emails into per-repo or per-org folders.

Import Project Environment Variables

This feature enables you to import project environment variables from projects in the same organization to save time and typing. On the Settings screen for your project, click the Import Variable(s) button on the Environment Variables page and select from the list.

Authorize Only Public GitHub Repositories

This feature enables you to join CircleCI without providing access to your private GitHub repos. To limit access, select Public Repos Only from the Start with Github menu on the signup page.

My/All Build Filtering

Looking for the builds most relevant to your actions? You can now filter builds by “my builds” (builds you triggered) or “all builds” (builds triggered by other users on your team). The filter can be found near the top, right-hand corner of your dashboard. Currently, this feature is only available on the organization and project-level.

Automatic collection of Fastlane logs for macOS projects

The logs produced by the Fastlane tools are now being stored as build artifacts so that you can easily access them later.

Granular control over fork PR builds

It is now possible to control whether to run builds for pull requests coming from forks and whether to pass the secrets from the main project to the fork on such builds, via two separate settings. Check out the Advanced Settings tab for your project for more details.

Fetch CocoaPods from S3 instead of Git in iOS projects

A few weeks ago we started downloading CocoaPods specs from S3 instead of Git in projects that use our iOS inference. It is now also possible to download the specs from S3 in projects with manual configuration.

Please check out this Discuss post for an example of downloading specs from S3 via a circle.yml command.

Improved code signing flow for OS X builds

It is now possible to upload provisioning profiles under the ‘Permissions’ section of your OS X project settings. Once uploaded, we will automatically import the profiles during your OS X builds. Profiles are encrypted at rest on the CircleCI side.

This update removes the need to keep the provisioning profiles checked into your repository and simplifies the setup of code signing for new OS X projects.

Emails now link you to your 'Failing Command'

CircleCI offers the ability to link directly to build output steps. We’ve now extended this feature into build email notifications. You should now see a clickable ‘Failing Command’ on (failed) build notification emails which will open the build page to the failed command in your build output.

Confirmation modal for stop building projects on CircleCI,

We have added a confirmation message to prevent users from accidentally stopping the builds on CircleCI.

Interactive ‘Build Timing’ graph

We have added functionality to click through the ‘Build Timing’ graph to access different sections of the build.

Anchor to a particular step within build output

Users can show share link to a particular step within their build output; Eg. https://circleci.com/gh/spotify/helios/5091#tests/containers/0/actions/4

Flash notifications for adding & deleting keys

We have added flash notification when users add or remove Apple Code Signing key, API permissions, SSH key or environment variables.