Block step timeout

Coming from a Jenkins world, Buildkite’s Block step seems much more versatile than Jenkins’ Input step. However, Buildkite’s Block step is lacking a timeout, so if the block is never resolved, the job just ‘hangs’ indefinitely - it’s not using an agent, but it leaves cruft in the repo’s pipeline view.

Having a timeout in place on the Block step could open up a variety of useful options for users:

  • Jobs get cancelled after the timeout.
  • The default option is executed after the timeout.
  • The notion of a polyphasic deploy pipeline - we only intend to deploy to integration right now, but our pipeline is capable of deploying all the way to production if we desire. So we can do our integration deploy successfully, and the pipeline can reflect a successful build despite the pipeline not being utilized to completion.

Original GitHub feedback issue: https://github.com/buildkite/feedback/issues/474

Seems to be a problem for release pipelines when somebody has to accept manually the deployment, if they don’t and forget it stays there forever.
Then some other time after many releases, somebody opens the wrong pipeline hits continue and last years release gets deployed!

Hey @arkaitzj!

Thanks for your feedback! This is a feature that is on our backlog and we hope to work on this soon :pray:

Best!

Hi,
I wonder if there is any update on this topic?

Hey @Juhui!

Welcome to the community!
We don’t have an update yet :confused: we worked on other priorities and we didn’t have the time to properly work on this feature, but it’s still in our backlog.