Bitrise Pipelines — the feature that runs individual workflows in parallel — is now available on all plans for Bitrise users in beta. That’s right — Build Pipelines, the force behind organizing your CI/CD process, setting up advanced configurations with multiple tasks, and running them in parallel — is now available to all users, in beta. So, what can you expect from Build Pipelines if you haven’t used it yet?
Then vs now: What has changed with parallel builds?
Previously, when starting parallel builds, you had to use the Bitrise Start Build Step. This used an access token, and multiple workflows you wanted to trigger in parallel. The drawback of this was that it would create individual builds, with no visual link between those builds, meaning you had to (for example) look for builds and when they were complete.
Changing this, and to make things easier, Bitrise introduced a Build Pipelines UI that captures builds and build details within a workflow — in an easy-to-understand dashboard. It includes:
- A quick overview of the current state of a running pipeline
- Pipeline details like green (succeeded) and red (failed) builds, build duration, and credit cost of your builds
- Visibility into a running pipeline with all its workflows and artifacts
- The build list: your the single entry point for all your builds and workflows included in the pipeline
- A simpler way to understand when your pipelines are finished.
What can you expect from Build Pipelines?
1. Parallel builds
You can run your builds in parallel and get mobile apps into production quicker. PR checks can be executed faster because more developers are able to commit builds to branches, and they gain the ability to compare sequential builds to ones already parallelized. What's more, artifacts produced in one stage can be reused in the next build — resulting in faster CI results, faster builds, and lower credit consumption.
2. Test-sharding / UI test parallelization
Large test suites can be split up into individual tests, and run in parallel to save you developer time. UI tests, unit tests, simulator tests, and security tests (you name it) can run individually to help you identify where a step is failing faster.
3. Partial re-run
Why wait for a whole workflow to be re-run when you can run part of a workflow and get it done quicker? When a workflow fails, select to re-run only the workflow that failed in your stage. Build Pipeline’s partial re-run also makes 3rd party flakiness a non-issue — giving you gains in:
- Developer productivity
- Time, and
- Money.
How to set up Build Pipelines in YML?
Any Bitrise user can set up Build Pipelines today using the bitrise.yml editor. No extra steps or maintenance are needed. Visit Bitrise DevCenter to learn how to define the pipeline stages and their workflows.
Happy building!
