About CircleCI
Cloud Server v3.x Server v2.x Software teams want to move faster, but often lack the confidence to accelerate quickly. Our mission is to manage change so software teams can innovate faster. We want to empower technology-driven organizations to do their best work – and make engineering teams more productive and innovative by managing change. Build, test, and deploy by using intelligent automation.
We work where you work: Linux, macOS, Android, and Windows - in the cloud or on your servers. CircleCI provides enterprise-class support and services, with the flexibility of a startup.
What is continuous integration?
Continuous integration is a practice that encourages developers to integrate their code into a main branch of a shared repository early and often. Instead of building out features in isolation and integrating them at the end of a development cycle, code is integrated with the shared repository by each developer multiple times throughout the day.
Continuous integration is a key step to digital transformation.
Every developer commits daily to a shared mainline. Every commit triggers automated tests and builds. If these fail, they can be repaired quickly - within minutes.
Why? Continuous integration improves team productivity, efficiency, confidence, and happiness. Find problems and solve them quickly. Release higher quality, more stable products.
CircleCI in your workflow
A software repository on a supported version control system needs to be authorized and added as a project on circleci.com. Every code change then triggers automated tests in a clean container or virtual machine. CircleCI runs each job in a separate container or virtual machine.
CircleCI then sends an email notification of success or failure after the tests complete. CircleCI also includes integrated Slack and IRC notifications. Code test coverage results are available from the details page for any project for which a reporting library is added.
CircleCI may be configured to deploy code to various environments, including:
- AWS CodeDeploy
- AWS EC2 Container Service (ECS)
- AWS S3, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- Microsoft Azure
- Heroku
The orbs registry contains packages of reusable configuration that can be used for common deployment targets. Orbs simplify and streamline your configuration.
Other cloud service deployments can be scripted using SSH, or by installing the API client of the service with your job configuration.
Benefits of CircleCI
CircleCI runs nearly one million jobs per day in support of 30,000 organizations. Organizations choose CircleCI because jobs run fast and builds can be optimized for speed.
CircleCI can be configured to run very complex pipelines efficiently with sophisticated caching, docker layer caching, and resource classes for running on faster machines.
As a developer using CircleCI you can:
- SSH into any job to debug your build issues.
- Set up parallelism in your .circleci/config.yml file to run jobs faster.
- Configure caching with two simple keys to reuse data from previous jobs in your workflow.
- Configure self-hosted runners for unique platform support.
- Access Arm resources for the machine executor.
- Use orbs, reusable packages of configuration, to integrate with third parties.
- Use pre-built Docker images in a variety of languages.
- Use the API to retrieve information about jobs and workflows.
- Use the CLI to access advanced tools locally.
- Get flaky test detection with test insights.
As an operator or administrator of CircleCI installed on your own servers, CircleCI provides monitoring and insights into your builds and uses Nomad for scheduling.
See the CircleCI Operations and Installation Guides for complete server documentation.
Pricing options
Visit CircleCI’s Pricing page to view free and paid options.
You can sign up for free to get access to unlimited projects on CircleCI’s fully-hosted cloud platform.
Organizations on the free plan are given free credits to use on open source projects. Visit Building Open Source Projects for more information about free containers for public open source projects.
Learn More
In the Docs:
- Concepts for basic concepts of CI/CD pipeline management
- Examples and Guides Overview for platform-specific setup guides
On CircleCI Academy:
On our blog:
- Config best practices: dependency caching
- Automate and scale your CI/CD with CircleCI orbs
- How to secure your CI pipeline
Help make this document better
This guide, as well as the rest of our docs, are open source and available on GitHub. We welcome your contributions.
- Suggest an edit to this page (please read the contributing guide first).
- To report a problem in the documentation, or to submit feedback and comments, please open an issue on GitHub.
- CircleCI is always seeking ways to improve your experience with our platform. If you would like to share feedback, please join our research community.
Need support?
Our support engineers are available to help with service issues, billing, or account related questions, and can help troubleshoot build configurations. Contact our support engineers by opening a ticket.
You can also visit our support site to find support articles, community forums, and training resources.
CircleCI Documentation by CircleCI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
