Buildkite CLI not working locally, but working on the buildkite builds

Pipelines
1

in a similar fashion to Can't make `buildkite-agent pipeline upload` work on my machine - #7 by zenogueira, it seems that Buildkite CLI has a different behaviour in the builds generated in Buildkite, than in the local environment. I want to understand what is the issue this time.

My setup is: I have a local cluster where I spawn a few agents on my machine and then builds are triggered by buildkite.

I was just trying out the cli, and tried to run a simple command: bk build view, as in the README.

on my machine I get:

$ bk build view
Error: Failed to resolve a pipeline.

on buildkite step (I added a new step manually with just the command) I get:

$ bk build view
┃ Select a pipeline
┃ > pipeline1
┃   pipeline2
┃   pipeline3

I have tried adding all the env variables in the bk build to my local env, but I still have the same issue, this doesn’t fix it, it’s something else. What do I need to do to have the same behaviour? When buildkite runs builds on my machine i’d expect it not to be too different of what I have on my machine, especially for the bk cli, which doesn’t come by default with buildkite-agent.

Bottom line, my question is: what are the limitations in the use of bk in the builds, and does it work well on linux? I see mac seems to be your target distribution platform, but we use debian. On my machine I’m on mac and spawning agents on my machine/mac too.

Thanks for your help :)

2

Hi zenogueira!

I hope your week is going well! Welcome to the Buildkite CLI!

Pipelines are “resolved”, or divined :magic_wand:, explicitly and implicitly. If you type just bk build view --help, you’ll find a bunch of examples that contribute to explicitly resolving a pipeline. When you run it without arguments, it depends on what it can determine implicitly, and that means it will look for a “preferred pipeline” setting in the .bk.yaml file, or it will try to determine whether you’re calling it within a repository.

So my guess is that the folder you’re calling bk build view isn’t a repo/branch connected to a pipeline and the cli needs more help to figure out what to look at.

Best bets: See if you can run in a repo folder with a branch that Buildkite knows about and has builds, or add a arg to the command.