Hello Buildkite

I’ve written before about Buildkite and how awesome it is, but recently they have made it even more awesome than it was before. They have release v3 of their agent, which adds some really sweet functionality. Make sure to check their post about it as well. 😃

Welcome v3

You can read about all new features, such as agent annotation and environment variable substitution in the post I mentioned above, but what I really want to talk about are the plugins.

Plugins are essentially an extension to the native functionality of the agent itself. We currently run a lot in docker containers in which we install extra software that we need or we add extra steps with scripts that provide some extra functionality, logging in to AWS ECR for example.

Well, now we can just simply use a plugin. There is already a library with open-source plugins which you can directly use, or you can write a plugin yourself.

Let’s take the ecr-buildkite-plugin for example. You can use it to automatically log in to ECR without having to add an extra step with a custom script.

steps:
  - command: ruby build.rb
    plugins:
      ecr#v1.1.3:
        login: true

Awesome, right? 😃 There are much more plugins which I encourage you to go and play around with.

Go an try it out yourself

The Buildkite documentation offers extensive information on using the plugins and the rest of the new features, so definitely check it out together with the rest of the awesome new additions to the agent as well.