Pipeline Processing
Cloud Server v3.x This document describes how your projects are processed using our pipelines engine and some of the features available to use in your pipelines. Pipelines are available on CircleCI cloud and self hosted installations of CircleCI server v3.x.
What are pipelines?
CircleCI pipelines are the highest-level unit of work, encompassing a project’s full .circleci/config.yml file. Pipelines include your workflows, which coordinate your jobs. They have a fixed, linear lifecycle, and are associated with a specific actor. Pipelines trigger when a change is pushed to a project that has a CircleCI configuration file included, and can also be scheduled, triggered manually through the CircleCI app, or using the API.
Pipelines are not available on installations of CircleCI server v2.x.
The following features are available for use in your pipelines:
- Trigger a pipeline via the API with the trigger a pipeline endpoint.
- Use pipeline parameters to trigger conditional workflows.
- Use
version 2.1config, which provides access to:- Reusable config elements, including executors, commands and jobs.
- Packaged reusable config, known as orbs.
- Improved config validation error messages.
- Option to enable auto-cancel, within Advanced Settings, to terminate workflows when new pipelines are triggered on non-default branches.
Note, it is important to carefully consider the impact of enabling the auto-cancel feature, for example, if you have configured automated deployment jobs on non-default branches.
Transitioning to pipelines
When migrating from a server v2.x to a v3.x installation you will have project configurations made before the introduction of pipelines. Pipelines are automatically enabled for server v3.x installations so all you need to do is change your project configurations (.circleci/_config.yml) to version: 2.1 to access all the features described in the section above.
See also
Refer to the Skipping and Cancelling Builds document for more details.
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).
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