Changelog

What’s New in Release 2.17

Known Issues

There have been reports of our backpressure settings being too aggressive due to lack of nomad garbage collecting, as well as issues with the Vm Service overwhelming AWS API Limits. If you are on 2.17, you should upgrade to 2.17.1.

Required Changes

IMPORTANT We have upgraded Replicated to version 2.34.1 which requires Docker 17.12.1. Please follow the instructions provided in the Updating Server Replicated Version guide before upgrading.

• When using Github Enterprise, operators will now need to provide CircleCI with a Github User Token in the Management Console Settings. This is required due to a change in how the Github Enterprise API allows us to verify Organizations. It is recommended that you use a shared ops account to generate this token. After upgrading to CircleCI Server v2.17, please follow these steps to enact this change:
  • Sign into your GitHub Enterprise instance.
  • Navigate to Personal Settings (top right) > Developer Settings > Personal Access Tokens.
  • Click “generate new token”. Name the token appropriately to prevent accidental deletion. Do not tick any of the checkboxes.
  • Copy the new token and paste it into the Management Console settings. (Github Integration > GitHub Enterprise Default API Token)
  • Save the settings in Replicated.

Notes and Best Practices

• Fill out this form to receive updates about CircleCI through email.
• It is currently a best practice to use a Services Machine with a minimum of 32GB of RAM. Starting in 2.18 it will become required. See docs for our recommendation(s).
• We have updated our software packages to the following versions. This is not a required update for those with externalized environments at this time, but will be when v2.18 is released.
  • Vault
    • 1.1.2
  • Mongo
    • 3.6.12-xenial
  • Redis
    • 4.0.14
• We are removing the 1.0 Single-Box options from CircleCI 2.0. We found a few critical vulnerabilities in our 1.0 build image, and we have long stopped recommending it for trials. If this is absolutely critical to your workflow please reach out to us. This does not impact people who are running 1.0 in clustered mode.

Features/Improvements

• Workflows now has a Slack Integration! Users can choose to receive Slack notifications when their workflows complete.
• Administrators can now restrict what organizations are allowed into their CircleCI installation. For more details on how to enable this feature, please see the User Management Section of the 2.17 Ops Manual.
• We changed the renamed org flow so orgs that have been renamed will no longer result in errors going forward. Existing users who had applied workarounds for this use case will now no longer require said workarounds.
• Workflows now take up less DB space and will be easier to maintain going forward.
• Improved the cache in front of GraphQL API resulting in overall improved performance.
• Added backpressure to avoid overwhelming nomad with requests, this will result in increased performance from existing nomad clusters.

• New machine executor AMIs based on Ubuntu 16.04 for AWS.

• Ubuntu 16.04 with Docker 18.06.3 has apt-daily and apt-daily-upgrade services disabled.
  • It is highly recommended that customers try to experiment with the AMIs below before officially switching:
  • The new images are as follows
    • Ap-northeast-1:ami-0e49af0659db9fc5d
    • Ap-northeast-2:ami-03e485694bc2da249
    • Ap-south-1:ami-050370e57dfc6574a
    • Ap-southeast-1:ami-0a75ff7b28897268c
    • Ap-southeast-2:ami-072b1b45245549586
    • Ca-central-1:ami-0e44086f0f518ad2d
    • Eu-central-1:ami-09cbcfe446101b4ea
    • Eu-west-1:ami-0d1cbc2cc3075510a
    • Eu-west-2:ami-0bd22dcdc30fa260b
    • Sa-east-1:ami-038596d5a4fc9893b
    • Us-east-1:ami-0843ca047684abe87
    • Us-east-2:ami-03d60a35576647f63
    • Us-west-1:ami-06f6efb13d9ccf93d
    • us-west-2:ami-0b5b8ad02f405a909
  • They are replacing:
    • Ap-northeast-1:ami-cbe000ad
    • Ap-northeast-2:ami-629b420c
    • Ap-south-1:ami-97bac2f8
    • Ap-southeast-1:ami-63b22100
    • Ap-southeast-2:ami-dd6c73be
    • Ca-central-1:ami-d02c93b4
    • Eu-central-1:ami-b243eedd
    • Eu-west-1:ami-61de3718
    • Eu-west-2:ami-904e5ff4
    • Sa-east-1:ami-c22057ae
    • Us-east-1:ami-05b6e77e
    • Us-east-2:ami-9b4161fe
    • Us-west-1:ami-efc9e08f
    • Us-west-2:ami-ce8c94b7

Bug fixes

• Fixed some bugs related to GitHub API response handling and webhook handling.
• Fixed issue with Scheduled Workflows when the services machine is restarted.
• Fixed changing the RabbitMQ hostname for Scheduled Workflows when externalizing.
• You can no longer create contexts with no names. If you are using a context with no names, it will no longer be accessible from your execution environment.
• We have optimized our handling of large amounts of build output and test results XML, to avoid out-of-memory errors.
• The CIRCLE_PULL_REQUEST environment variable was not being populated correctly in all cases when building across forks. This has been fixed.
• Fixed a bug where some commits with [ci skip] in the message were still being built.
• Fixed a bug causing Workflows to get stuck when infrastructure_failure happens after a job fails.
• Fixed a bug causing duplicate docker networks on same nomad client (if running build using machine:true AND vm-provider=on_host).
• Improved performance when using local storage. Previously, caching issues had been experienced when local storage was used rather than the default option of using S3 (selecting None under Storage Driver options from the Management Console).
• We have added more error checking and validation around Github’s API so the existing list commit endpoint no longer causes issues.
• Datadog API token field was stored in plaintext, now set as a password field.
• Fixed issue where workflows were constrained from fanning out to large number of jobs.

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What’s Fixed in Release 2.16.1

• Bug Fix: This release includes a new flag to disable GitHub cache warming. Note: Only add this flag if a high thread count is impacting the API service. To disable cache warming after completing the upgrade, complete the following steps:

1. Add the export DOMAIN_SERVICE_REFRESH_USERS=false flag to the /etc/circleconfig/api-service/customizations file on the Services machine.

2. Restart CircleCI by going to the Administrative console and clicking Stop Now, waiting for it to stop, then clicking Start.

• Bug Fix: Fixed issue preventing metrics from domain service from being forwarded.

• Security Fix: The SMTP password field in the dashboard was set to plain text. The password field will now be hidden.

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Note: It is currently a best practice to use a Services Machine with a minimum of 32GB of RAM. Starting in 2019 it will become required. See docs for our recommendation(s).

What’s New in Release 2.16

The following updates and fixes are also of note:

IMPORTANT We have upgraded Replicated to version 2.29.0 which requires Docker 17.12.1. Please follow the instructions provided in the Updating Server Replicated Version guide before upgrading.

New Feature We are excited to announce that you can now distribute your data and workload external to the Services Machine. The following services can be externalized; MongoDB, Redis, Nomad Server, RabbitMQ, Postgres and Vault. Please contact your CSM for the latest documentation.

New Feature Custom Metrics can now be accomplished via a Telegraf Output Configuration File. See the Custom Metrics section of the Monitoring section. Note: The Custom Metrics section in the admin UI been disabled in favor of a configuration file.

New Feature Users can now receive email notifications about Workflows

New Feature The PostgreSQL image has been updated to allow modifying the default configuration by creating the following file: /etc/circleconfig/postgres/extra.conf A list of configuration options can be found here.

Updated Removing EOL Banner on build emails

Updated VM Service stability improvements

Bug Fix Fix issue with contexts that would break after 32 days

Bug Fix Vault auth tokens will now renew periodically to prevent expiration

Bug Fix Fix for an issue where workflow listing pages would intermittently fail to render

Bug Fix We have fixed a small number of bugs affecting processing incoming web hooks from GitHub to CircleCI.

Bug Fix For installs that are using an HTTP or HTTPS proxy, the jobs will now ignore that proxy so that setup_remote_docker works.

Bug Fix Reduced the number of connections 1.0 builders make to the PostgreSQL database.

Security Fix Security fixes for potential cross-site scripting vulnerability and HTTP header injection vulnerability

Security Fix Forked PRs can no longer write the caches of parent projects by default for security reasons. It is possible to still write parent project caches from the fork if the “Pass secrets to builds from forked pull requests” (in Advanced settings) is enabled.

Update Improved metrics for VM provisioning for machine executor. This changed metric names, so if you are monitoring VM provisioning in your install already, you will need to reconfigure the monitoring dashboards for these new metrics.

• New metrics:
  • vm-service.gauges.available-vms and vm-service.gauges.running-vms replaced by vm-service.gauges.vms_by_status
  • vm-service.gauges.running-tasks replaced by vm-service.gauges.tasks_by_status
  • vm-service.gauges.oldest-unassigned-task replaced by vm-service.gauges.unassigned_tasks_age

Known Issue(s)

When a saved context is removed during the build graph phase it can cause a silent failure during job execution.
In some instances the metrics section becomes hidden in the settings page. Please see this Knowledge article for instructions.

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"

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 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.

Fill out this form to receive updates about CircleCI through email.

Note: It is currently a best practice to use a Services Machine with a minimum of 32GB of RAM. Starting in 2019 it will become required. See docs for our recommendation(s).

What’s New in Release 2.15

This release contains an upgrade to MongoDB, service migrations for contexts and is a required upgrade. The following updates and fixes are also of note:

MongoDB Upgrade The MongoDB version running on Services VM will be automatically updated from 3.2 to 3.6 for you. If you have externalized MongoDB and wish to upgrade to 3.6, please contact your CSM

Bug Fix Restrict interaction of Workflows ‘Rerun’ dropdown to users who are part of GitHub organization for open-source projects.

Bug Fix Known issue for broken UI due to workflows with “.” in the name

Bug Fix Known performance issue with freezed browsers for organizations with many branches.

Bug Fix Known issue for Vault auth tokens not being automatically renewed. If you have externalized Vault, please contact your CSM before you upgrade to 2.15.0

New Feature: Splitting test files via Workflows. If your project has a large number of tests, you can use circleci tests split feature to reduce your job run time. For more information on how to setup tests split, please follow this document.

New Feature: Workflows UI will now show actors who have taken the following actions:

• Rerun workflows
• Approved jobs
• Canceled jobs

New Feature We are excited to announce more Metrics! Nomad job metrics can be enabled and will be emitted by the Nomad Server. Please see Nomad Metrics documentation for instructions on how to configure Nomad Clients. The following five types of metrics are reported:

• circle.nomad.server_agent.poll_failure: Returns 1 if the last poll of the Nomad agent failed, otherwise it returns 0.
• circle.nomad.server_agent.jobs.pending: Returns the total number of pending jobs across the cluster.
• circle.nomad.server_agent.jobs.running: Returns the total number of running jobs across the cluster.
• circle.nomad.server_agent.jobs.complete: Returns the total number of complete jobs across the cluster.
• circle.nomad.server_agent.jobs.dead: Returns the total number of dead jobs across the cluster.

New Feature Host (Services VM) and docker metrics can now be forwarded via Telegraf , a plugin-driven server agent for collecting & reporting metrics, to DataDog or a custom location. To enable and/or configure please go tohttps://example.com/settings#metrics. For more information please see the Monitoring documentation.

Performance Improvement Reduced the load time for all workflows pages.

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 debugging/profiling tools and Xdebug with PHP.

Updated JVM_HEAP_SIZE is configurable for frontend, output-processor, and test-result containers. Please see JVM Heap Size Configuration documentation.

Updated For customers running the Static installation, Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) has been added as a supported OS. For additional details please see the docs.

Known Issue(s)

When a saved context is removed during the build graph phase it can cause a silent failure during job execution.
When using the none storage driver, the cache will not be saved. This means that you currently cannot use caching in CircleCI when you are using the none storage driver.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What’s New in Release 2.14

This release contains service migrations for contexts and is a required upgrade. The following updates and fixes are also of note:

Fixed: Pre-allocated VMs not being used. Customers reported that jobs using machine executor and setup_remote_docker were continuing to spin up (and terminate) new VMs at runtime instead of the pre-allocated pool.

Fixed: Unable to build in AWS region eu-west-2.

Updated: The title of the Builds page in the CircleCI application was changed to Jobs in several places to better reflect the structure of builds.

Updated: Contexts are now checked for unique naming across your installation of CircleCI instead of just within an organization. You will no longer be able to create duplicate context names within an account. Existing duplicates will be honored by the system, but should be changed to avoid future collisions. Please see the Contexts documentation for further information.

Updated: The test-results services cleans up the /tmp directory on restart and the JVM heap size increased from 256m to 512m.

Known Issue(s)

When a saved context is removed during the build graph phase it can cause a silent failure during job execution.
When using the none storage driver, the cache will not be saved. This means that you currently cannot use caching in CircleCI when you are using the none storage driver.

Migration Tools: The 1.0 migration center was updated with additional content and helpful tools to migrate projects from CircleCI 1.0 to 2.0.

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.

What’s New in Release 2.13*

• Fixed: Due to a certificate not being imported jobs were unable to submit after a container restart.
• Fixed: Stability issues within contexts service.
• Fixed: vm-service issue where AWS ECS and EBS volumes were left used. Added better idempotent client retries, API eventual consistency handling.
• Added: vm-service EBS Volumes cache evictor. Docker Layer Caching EBS volumes get deleted after 14 days of unused. You can control the inactivity period in Installation Admin Settings page.
• Added: Periodic checks to scale down any unused long running instances (e.g. due to reduction in prescaling configurations, or or due to a bug preventing termination of VMs in timely manner).
• Added: Optimizations to speed up provisioning. Resiliency to network/external changes.
• CircleCI is excited to announce that users on AWS can now forward host (Services VM) and docker metrics via Telegraf , a plugin-driven server agent for collecting & reporting metrics, to AWS CloudWatch. This is is the first step into bringing you greater observability into your installation. To enable and configure please go tohttps://example.com/settings#metrics. In this release the following metrics may be enabled: Docker , Networking , Disk , Memory, and CPU. For more information please see the Monitoring documentation.
• CircleCI is enhancing visibility by capturing usage statistics of CircleCI installations. This aggregate data will be used to better support you and ensure a smooth transition off 1.0. This optional feature is automatically available when you upgrade to the latest version of your installation or once a support bundle is downloaded. Below are the metrics being captured. If you would like access to this data in order to better understand your users please contact a CircleCI account representative. Please reference exhibit C within your terms of contract and our standard license agreement for our complete security and privacy disclosures. For more information please see the Usage Statistics documentation.

Weekly Account Usage

Weekly Job Activity

* this release contains migrations and is a required upgrade

The installable version of CircleCI Server 2.9.0 includes the following improvements and bug fixes:

• Resolution for a potential LDAP injection vulnerability
• Addition of support for the following LDAP fields:
  • Group Membership
  • Group Object Classes

See the Authentication document for the steps.

• Addition of default values for OpenLDAP and Active Directory
• Stability and bug fixes for an issue with test results
• Improvements to ready agent logging for support bundles
• Stability fixes and speed improvements for provisioning remote Docker engine
• Reliability improvements for the permissions service client
• Differentiation between the LDAP login and email to remove email as the assumed login value
• Fix for a bug that deselected all projects when a new user logged in for the first time
• Fix for a bug that was preventing Workflows from working correctly when located behind a proxy
• Bug fixes and improvements for Contexts

The installable version of CircleCI 2.8.0 includes the following fixes and improvements:

• An issue involving pre-allocated remote docker, machine VM creation, and other VM usage on AWS when the on-host VM option is selected has been fixed.

• An issue with the VM provider timing out when waiting for SSH to connect has been fixed. This upgrade supersedes any custom values for the Number of SSH attempts for starting VM setting and adds an equivalent field named Timeout for waiting for SSH to connect to VM(s) that you must set.