Changelog

What’s New

Container agent is a new type of self-hosted runner in open preview. Container agent adds support for the Docker executor with self-hosted runners, as well as basic auto-scaling and integration with Kubernetes.

Read more in the Discuss post.

Refer to our documentation for more information.

CircleCI server v4.0.0 is now generally available. The feature set for this release are equal to server v3.x. The installation and upgrade processes for v4.x have changed significantly.

Server v4.x offers greatly improved security handling, installation, and update processes. Server v4.x is installed using helm charts and images that can be pulled ahead of time to comply with your security processes. Installation processes can also use artifacts pulled from customer-managed registries. Server v4.x makes improved use of Kubernetes secrets and removes the requirement to grant permissions and network access to third-party tools.

Before upgrading

See the CircleCI server 4.x release notes for upgrade notes for this release.

What’s new in release 4.0.0

New features

• Two new Arm resource classes are now available xlarge and 2xlarge. For more information on using Arm, see the Arm docs.
• CircleCI server v4.x images and helm charts are available for licenced users.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that was causing a huge quantity of error logs in the distributer-internal pod.
• Prometheus is no longer included by default in CircleCI server v4.x.
• The default concurrency limit has been increased to avoid it being reached.
• Docker layer caching volumes are now deleted after 3 days if unused. Previously they were deleted after 7 days.
• kong is now placed behind NGINX to simplify loadbalancer setup.
• The loadbalancer has been renamed from circleci-traefik to circleci-proxy.
• Workflow configurations that are stored in PostgreSQL will migrated to the Object Storage.

Known issues

• Telegraf needs to have its configuration overwritten and base64 encoded.
• When migrating from 3.x to 4.x, workflow configuration migrations will run as an init job and the workflows-conductor-event-consumer and the workflows-conductor-grpc-handler pods will not start until the migration completes. Customers with large PostgreSQL databases should plan accordingly. Migration time can be reduced by scaling the workflow-conductor pods.
• Webhook-service may not work with an externalized Vault.
• Vault may not refresh its client token after a month of uptime.
• Retry with SSH for jobs using the machine executor advertises a private IP address. For this reason, retry with SSH for jobs using the machine executor works as standard for public installations, but for private installs you would need to ensure that you can access the private IP advertised. For example, by using a VPN into your VPC.
• CircleCI 1.0 builds are not supported. If an attempt is made to run a 1.0 build, no feedback will be available in the application to indicate the cause of the issue. If a build is run on your installation and does not show up in the CircleCI application, users should be directed to use the CircleCI CLI to validate the project configuration and get details of the possible cause of the issue.

To learn more about Server 4.x installation, migration, or operations please see our documentation.

What’s New

GitLab is now generally available for CircleCI. You are able to connect to GitLab and run pipelines from your GitLab repos. GitLab support also offers a new model for roles and permissions in CircleCI, independent of the VCS. This gives you full control over users and their access permissions.

We will continue to release GitLab-related features in Q3. These include project roles, restricted contexts, scheduled pipelines, and auto-cancel redundant workflows.

Each user can create up to three free organizations. A free organization can have up to 10 projects. If you need additional organizations or projects, consider upgrading to a paid plan, or contact our Support team.

What’s New

Today, CircleCI launched the CircleCI Public Roadmap, which showcases some of the product features and focus areas we are investing in. This product roadmap includes a set of features customers have expressed interest in and requested.

If you would like to provide feedback or suggestions on how we can improve the roadmap, please submit your request in the CircleCI Public Roadmap Ideas page.

What’s New

CircleCI now supports using Test Splitting on jobs that run on self-hosted runners. With this release, Runner jobs can take advantage of CircleCI’s parallelism and Test Splitting features in a manner identical to how jobs that run on CircleCI-hosted compute use the features.

For more detailed information on Test Splitting for Runner, please see the Canny and CircleCI Discuss posts.

What’s New

CircleCI has made it possible for you to access the billing portal without needing to be redirected away from the CircleCI website and on to Chargify’s portal. This eliminates any issues regarding the security of payment details.

The Billing Portal allows you to have complete access to your plan and payment settings including:

• making changes to your plan
• adding/removing credit packages
• adding coupons
• adding a new credit card
• viewing and downloading billing statements

With this update, you will now have access to all of this information in one single window that can be accessed directly through your CircleCI dashboard.

What’s New

The IP ranges feature is now generally available to all customers on a Performance or Scale plan. This feature is designed for customers who need to configure IP-based access to their restricted environments. As part of this feature, CircleCI provides a list of well-defined IP addresses associated with the CircleCI service. CircleCI jobs that have this feature enabled will have their traffic routed through one of these defined IP addresses.

As of January 28, 2022; the feature will incur 450 credits per GB of data usage for jobs that have IP ranges enabled.

Note: IP ranges is currently only available for Docker jobs, not including remote_docker.

For more detailed information about IP ranges, please refer to the IP ranges technical documentation.

For information on CircleCI plans, refer to the Pricing and Plans page.

What’s New

We have released a new generation of macOS resources. These new resources can speed up builds by up to 50%, and are available to customers on Performance, Custom, and Scale plans.

For more information about these resources, please see the Discuss post.

For detailed technical documentaton about macOS resources, please see the macOS documentation.

What’s New

Scheduling work within CircleCI is an important way for you to run pipelines. In addition to periodic rebuilds of the application, scheduled pipelines can be useful for security scans and certain utility jobs such as restarting services.

While Scheduled Workflows may address some of these issues, there are a number of limitations. Scheduled pipelines will be more consistent with other methods of triggering pipelines (webhooks/APIs), which includes:

• consolidating common schedules
• resolving open issues in functionality for Scheduled Workflows (no dynamic configuratin, limitations in handling restricted contexts)
• increased reliability

For more information about scheduled pipelines, please refer to the blog post and technical documentation.

What’s New

Many customers have expressed concerns about the permissions required for an account, especially if they are collaborators on public projects and do not use CircleCI outside of viewing pipeline results. This makes CircleCI less desirable compared to alternatives like GitHub Actions.

With this release, if you go to the pipelines, workflows, or jobs page for a public project, you will be able to see a similar view compared to if you are logged in.

Note that most features, such as reruns or Insights, are not available unless you are already logging in.

What’s New

Scheduling within CircleCI is an important way for you to run pipelines. In addition to periodic rebuilds of the application, schedules are useful for security scans and certain utility jobs such as restarting services.

While we currently have a solution, Scheduled Workflows, it has a number of limitations. Scheduled workflows will be more consistent with other methods of triggering pipelines (webhooks/APIs), consolidate common schedules, resolve some open issues in functionality for Scheduled Workflows (no dynamic config, limitations in handling restricted contexts), and will be more reliable.

More information about this update can be found here.

What’s New

The IP ranges feature is now available in open preview for all all customers on a Paid Plan. This feature was designed for customers who need to configure IP-based access to their restricted environments. As part of this feature, CircleCI provides a list of well-defined IP address ranges associated with the CircleCI service. CircleCI jobs that have this feature enabled will have their traffic routed through one of these defined IP address ranges.

Pricing will be calculated based on network data usage of jobs that have opted in to using the IP ranges feature. Although there is no charge while the feature is in open preview, pricing details will be shared soon and will take effect when the feature is generally available.

Note: IP ranges is currently only available for Docker jobs, not including remote_docker.

For more information about the IP ranges feature, please see the following Discuss post. You may also refer to the technical documentation for this feature, which can be found here.

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.

What’s New in Release 3.0.0

Server 3.0 is now generally available. The newest version of server offers the ability to scale under heavy workloads, all within your own Kubernetes cluster and private network, while still enjoying the full CircleCI cloud experience. Server 3.0 includes the latest CircleCI features, such as orbs, scheduled workflows, matrix jobs, and more. For existing customers interested in migrating from 2.19 to 3.x, contact your customer success manager. Server 3.0 will receive monthly patch releases and quarterly feature releases.

New Features

• New UI
• Orbs for Server
• Pipelines
• Config 2.1
• API 2.0
• Scheduled Workflows
• Matrix Jobs
• And much more…

Known Issues

• No support for external data stores (Postgres, Mongo, Vault). This feature will be implemented in a future release.
• It is currently possible for multiple organizations under the same CircleCI server account to have contexts with identical names. This should be avoided as doing so could lead to errors and unexpected behavior. This will be fixed in a future patch release.
• CircleCI 1.0 builds are not supported. If an attempt is made to run a 1.0 build, no feedback will be available in the application to indicate the cause of the issue. If a build is run on your installation and does not show up in the CircleCI application, users should be directed to use the CircleCI CLI to validate the project configuration and get details of the possible cause of the issue.
• CircleCI currently assigns a public load balancer for the frontend services. For some customers, their infrastructure or security groups won’t allow this. We will provide an optional internal local balancer for the frontend services in a future release.
• Telegraf metrics collection customization is not yet available.
• Support for GPU builders is not yet available.

To learn more about Server 3.0 installation, migration, or operations please see our documentation.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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:

• iOS Project Tutorial
• Testing iOS Applications on macOS
• Setting Up Code Signing for iOS Projects

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 jobs on the CircleCI application installed in your private cloud. The CircleCI 2.0 platform includes significant performance, stability, and reliability improvements along with first-class Docker support, Workflows (pipelines), Resource Allocation, and Contexts. The Management Console (Replicated) also includes new options for enabling 2.0 Builders and appropriate default settings.

If you have CircleCI installed you may access CircleCI 2.0 features on your current installation with no restrictions under your current agreement and support level. However, you must contact your CircleCI account representative for assistance with upgrading, to obtain migration scripts, and to receive a new license channel.

• CircleCI 2.0.0 is only available on AWS and may be installed with Terraform or manually.
• Teams may create a CircleCI 2.0 .circleci/config.yml file in their repositories to add new 2.0 projects incrementally while continuing to build 1.0 projects which use a circle.yml configuration file.

Documentation for the installable 2.0 application is available at CircleCI 2.0 Documentation for the following topics:

• Administrator’s Overview
• Administration FAQ
• Security Features
• Installing CircleCI 2.0 on Amazon Web Services with Terraform
• Configuring High Availability
• Administrative Variables, Monitoring, and Logging
• Introduction to Nomad Cluster Operation
• Backing up CircleCI Data

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.