Allow the rerunning of successful pipeline steps

Features Requests
1

This can make it easier for use cases like:

  • Using steps to deploy and rerunning a deployment step as a rollback mechanism
  • If you have flakey tests, re-run a successful testing step several times will be faster than rerunning an entire pipeline to see if it fails on subsequent runs
2

Hi David,

First of all welcome to Buildkite community and thank you asking the question.

Regarding use case 1 which is “Using steps to deploy and rerunning a deployment step as a rollback mechanism” are you referring to retry of a specific step even though it is successful ?

Regarding use case 2, one option is using automatic retry attribute with exit_status as 0 and setting limit to number of retries you prefer so that way a step can be re run for flakey tests scenario

For use case 1, if it is also about retrying a successful step then same automatic retry attribute with exit_status as 0 should help. If not, please can you share more details on it so I can look into it.

Once again thank you for asking the question and welcome to the Buildkite community.

3

I think permit_on_passed does what you want?

See https://buildkite.com/docs/pipelines/command-step#retry-attributes.

    retry:
      manual:
        permit_on_passed: true