Changelog

What’s New

CircleCI has just release 7 new Insights API endpoints to improve pipeline observability and tracking. You can now access even more insights features such as:

• flaky tests
• workflow time series
• organization performance data
• project performance data.

For more information about these new endpoints, refer to the CircleCI API v2 Insights documentation.

What’s New

Your organization will now be able to take advantage of updated usage controls, which can reduce credits wasted on actions run by unregistered users. This is a function available on your CircleCI dashboard and can be enabled/disabled by your account admin.

This update helps your organization direct credit consumption away from invaluable actions. In app, an unregistered user will see a prompt to register themselves first before continuing to build. This makes it easier for the org to keep track of the user as well as spend, resulting in significant credits savings that could have otherwise been used towards running builds and pipelines.

For more information about usage controls, visit the Usage Control tab URL here: app.circleci.com/settings/plan/[githubORbitbucket]/[OrganizationName]/usage-controls.

What’s New

We have made some exciting updates to our free plan, including giving teams more build minutes and access to our most popular features formerly only available on paid plans.

Some features on our new Free plan include:

• Up to 6,000 build minutes per month. Choose the right resource class size (S-L) to optimize for speed and power, or to maximize your build minutes.
• Unlimited users. CI and CD work better with a team; bring everyone on board easily.
• The largest free resource classes on Docker, Linux, and Windows so you can choose the right compute for any job.
• Increased concurrency limits: now up to 30x on Linux, Arm, and Windows.
• Streamlined collaboration with private orbs: shareable CircleCI configuration packages.
• Security. Our top priority is protecting our users’ intellectual property and sensitive secrets such as keys, tokens, and credentials. Rest easy with a suite of security features and compliance certifications, including FedRAMP and SOC 2 Type II.

You can learn about the of the changes here:

• CircleCI Blog - https://circleci.com/blog/most-generous-free-cicd-plan/
• Technical Documentation - https://circleci.com/docs/credits/#free-plan

What’s New

When you use our Windows executors, you may now take advantage of a larger disk size of 200 GB. This increase in storage size unlocks scenarios where you may wish to download large amounts of software during job execution (ie. gaming engines).

For more information about this update, please see the Discuss for more details.

What’s New

SSH reruns have historically been run as independent jobs, rather than as part of a workflow. This makes those jobs difficult to track and manage, causing them to block customers with limited concurrency. We are now running SSH reruns as workflow reruns, so they will appear in the same way that “rerun from failed” workflows appear.

This will make reruns easier to manage and track since they will be connected to the pipelines and workflows they were in when originally run, both in the API and UI.

Note The CircleCI v2 API now supports enabling SSH for re-running workflows.

What’s New

You can now interact with private orbs via the CircleCI web app. A list of your organization’s orbs has been added on the Organization Settings page, and new private orb details pages that open in the orb registry have also been added as part of this release. The orbs list shows all public and private orbs authored by your organization / in your organization’s namespace(s), while the private orb details pages open in the Orbs registry and are flagged with a new “private” badge. Please note you will only be able to see these pages if you are logged in and authenticated; if you are not logged in, you will receive a 404 error.

With this update, you may select your preferred way to interact with orbs, which can be either the CircleCI CLI or the CircleCI App, while also being able to easily share private orb information with other users in your organization.

Note: This update will not add private orbs to the searchable Orb Registry, and un-published orbs will not have linked details pages.

What’s New

You can now review the CPU & memory utilization for docker jobs on CircleCI’s hosted cloud compute. A new Resources tab on the job details page displays this data and easy-to-consume graphs for docker jobs.

Early anecdotal evidence has shown that some customers that have used this page to upgrade their resource classes and noticed their jobs were completed quicker. Future updates will include enhancing the UX for highly parallelized jobs and adding a CTA for jobs for high CPU utilization.

What’s New

The test parallelism timing experience feature is now generally available and enables you to view information on parallel test times and bottlenecks so you can take this information and act on it to run your tests faster.

An example of what the timing tab looks like can be seen here.

What’s New

This update enables you to view information on parallel test times and bottlenecks so you can take this information and act on it to run your tests faster.

An example of what the timing tab looks like can be seen here.

The timing tab has been enabled for 25% of users in Optimizely. The plan is to roll out this new feature to a small segment of users to get early feedback.

Note This feature is currently in “preview” mode and is not available to all customers at this time.

What’s New

SSH reruns are now supported for Runner jobs. Although you have been able to SSH into cloud jobs to debug and inspect the system during and after the run, you may now use these same techniques for your Runner jobs.

For security and control purposes, the Runner launch agent requires a specific configuration to enable these SSH connections. Full details are available in the Runner documentation.

What’s New

Many customers have been asking for an easy way to manage the orbs they’ve authored, both public or private. To meet this need, we are rolling out a set of orbs usability enhancements inside the Circle app.

The first feature enhancement is a new orbs list that is available in Organization Settings. You can now see all orbs created by your organization along with key stats such as version, type, and usage.

What’s New

Webhooks are now available to all users. A webhook enables you to connect a platform you manage (either an API you create yourself, or a third party service) to a stream of future events.

Setting up a Webhook on CircleCI enables you to receive information (referred to as events) from CircleCI, as they happen. This can help you avoid polling the API or manually checking the CircleCI web application for desired information.

For more detailed information about webhooks, please see the Webhooks documentation, which can be found here.

Several new features have been released to improve the user experience when setting up configurations.

What’s New

Configuration sandbox

We have shipped a configuration sandbox so you can get immediate feedback while building your configuration. In this new experience, you can see the effect of your configuration change in a sandbox environment and offer corrections in the context of CircleCI configuration to get up and running faster.

Guide me - with orbs

We know users enjoy using orbs, therefore, we have made it easier to use and build a configuration with orbs. For new users, you will be able to walk through a series of steps that will take you through constructing a configuration using orbs.

Project setup for users w/existing configurations

We have made it easier for users who are ready to go and just want to build their projects on CircleCI. With this update, users now have the option to directly commit from any branch.

There have been a number of feature and user experience updates made to the CircleCI platform, which are described below.

What’s New

Feature updates

Status badge generator in project settings

Status badges are now available in Project Settings. This feature enables users to create a status badge more quickly for showing statuses on GitHub.

Add parameters to manual pipeline run

Users can now add one or more parameters when running a pipeline manually from the UI.

Iteration on copy step line link

We’ve made it easier for you to copy your code! When you hover over any part of a line in the step output, you’ll be able to see a blue copy icon.

UX updates

Follow project from branch drop down

If you happen to not have a project selected on CircleCI previously, you might have not been able to navigate to the page you’re looking for. Now when you select the drop-down, you can directly follow projects directly from the branch drop down and ensure you get to the project and page data you’re looking for.

Workflow status filter

Users may now filter to any combination of specific workflow statuses. Note that you may need to click the “See more” button if there are additional results.

What’s New

CircleCI has now made job and workflow webhooks feature available in open preview for all customers. “Job completed” and “Workflow completed” webhooks send status data, which may include states like success, failed, or canceled whenever a job or workflow reaches a terminal state.

For more detailed information about the webhooks feature, refer to the webhooks technical documentation, which can be found here.

If you would like to submit feedback on the webhooks feature, please submit your comments and feedback here.

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”.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.