Changelog

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

Xcode 13 Beta 4 image is now available on our macOS resource classes. This image replaces Xcode 13 Beta 2.

For more detailed information about this release, please see the Image Manifest.

Note: This image contains potentially breaking changes for NodeJS and Ruby 2.5 users. Please see the Release Notes for more details.

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

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

CircleCI’s quarterly Linux machine images are now available. The following updated Ubuntu 20.04 image is now available:

• ubuntu-2004:202107-01

This July refresh updates software included in the image. Refer to the machine executor docs for more information about how to use the machine executor and this image.

Please see the following Discuss post for more detailed information about these updates.

Before Upgrading

IMPORTANT: With this release, the frontend-external load balancer has been removed. The traefik load balancer now handles all incoming traffic. When updating from a previous server 3.x version, you will need to update the DNS record that was pointing to the frontend-external load balancer and have it point to the circleci-server-traefik load balancer instead. Remember, you can retrieve the external IP address or DNS name of your traefik load balancer by typing kubectl get svc/circleci-server-traefik in a terminal that has access to the cluster.

For further information see the What’s New doc.

What’s New in Release 3.1.0

New Features

• Telegraf plugins can now be added to server and customized to use third party monitoring solutions, for example, Datadog. For more information, see the Metrics and Monitoring doc.
• The option to use only private load balancers has been introduced for customers who want a fully private installation. For more information see the Load Balancers guide.
• Server 3.x hosts build artifacts, test results, and other state in object storage. We support any S3-compatible storage and Google Cloud Storage. For more information, see the Installation guide for further information.
• Dynamic config via setup workflows is now available on server installations. For more information see our blog post and the Dynamic Configuration docs page.
• Runner is now available on server. For further information, including installation steps, see the Runner docs. Runner allows the use of the macOS executor in server installations and VM service functionality for customers with server installed in a private data centre.
• The frontend load balancer from v3.0 has been removed and replaced with an Ingress resource and the Traefik Ingress controller. This is a breaking change requiring you to reconfigure your DNS. See the What’s New in server docs for further information and guidance.
• The following services can now be externalized. For setup information, see the server v3.x installation guide:
  • Postgres
  • MongoDB
  • Vault
• Backup and restore functionality is now available. For more information see the Backup and Restore guide.
• Prometheus is now deployed by default with server to monitor your cluster health and usage. Prometheus can be managed and configured from the KOTS admin UI. For further information, see the Metrics and Monitoring doc.
• Server now supports the 2XL resource class. The Nomad cluster needs to be made large enough to account for larger resource classes.
• The lifecycle of build artifacts and test results can now be configured from the KOTS admin console under Storage Object Expiry, including the option to disable the expiration and retain artifacts and test results indefinitely.

Fixes

• Resolved a collection of bugs that were causing sensitive information to be leaked into CircleCI support bundles:
  • Instances of faulty and partial redactions of secrets were detected, in part due to 3rd party bugs.
  • PostgresDB leaking sensitive information to STDOUT.
  • Several CircleCI services were logging secrets.
• Tightened network security in the Nomad terraform module.
• Terraform v0.15.0 and up are now supported.
• Updated installation scripts to use functions supported by most recent versions of Terraform.
• Resolved a bug that was leading to machine large builds being run on the wrong machine type. Machine large builds now correctly use 4 vCPUs and 16GB of RAM.
• Resolved a bug that caused contexts-service to fail on expiration of Vault client tokens.
• Resolved a bug that was causing legacy-notifier to report readiness prematurely.
• The JVM heap size parameter has been removed for all services. The heap size is set to be half of the memory limit.
• Changes to networking config and certs are now picked up automatically by Traefik. Previously, a restart would have been required.
• Minimum requirements for CPU and memory have changed. For the new values, see the Installation Prerequisites doc.

Known Issues

• 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 private installations, but for public installs you would need to ensure that you can access the private IP advertised, for example, by using a VPN into your VPC.
• 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.
• 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 3.0 installation, migration, or operations please see our documentation.

What’s New

In order to keep up to date with changes to Xcode, the following updates have been made:

Xcode 12.5.1 is now available

Xcode 12.5.1 is now available on CircleCI macOS resource classes. This image supersedes Xcode 12.5.0 which will be removed, and job requests will now be re-routed to Xcode 12.5.1.

Xcode 13 Beta 1 is now available

Xcode 13 Beta 1 image is now available on our macOS resource classes. This image enables developers to build and test their apps against iOS 15, tvOS 15 and watchOS 8 betas.

Xcode 13 Beta 2 is now available

Xcode 13 Beta 2 image is now available on our macOS resource classes. This image replaces Xcode 13 Beta 1.

For more information on these macOS updates, refer to the CircleCI macOS Containers page.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.