How to get start time and endtime for a job or step as Buildkite variable

Features Requests
1

Hi Team,

I have a requirement where I need to get the start and end time of a job/step and post it via notify to slack.

It would be great to have that as a variable that can be directly injected but I am open to other solutions as well, if that is not available.

Thanks and Regards,
Ismail

2

Hey Ismail,

To achieve this workflow, you can use the GraphQL API to query the job’s start and finish times with the query shown below.

query GetJobRunTimeByBuild{
  build(slug: "org-slug/pipeline-slug/build-number") {
    jobs(first: 1, step: {key: "insert-key"}) {
      edges {
        node {
          ... on JobTypeCommand {
            startedAt
            finishedAt
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

startedAt: DateTime when the job started running
finishedAt: DateTime when the job finished

Then extract this information then pass these values into a pipeline step for notifying Slack.

steps:
 - label: "Send Slack Message"
   command:   |
      startedAt="...."
      finishedAt"...."
      cat <<- YAML | buildkite-agent pipeline upload 
         steps:
           - label: "Notify slack about Job"
             command: echo  "Notify slack about Job"
             notify:
               - slack:
                   channels:
                     - "#general_test"
                   message: "The Job started at $$startedAt and finished at $$finishedAt"
      YAML