Soft Fail for cancelled builds

Features Requests
1

I thought at first (and perhaps I am just doing it wrong), but it would be great if soft fail passed builds that are cancelled. Currently it seems that the UI acknowledges the soft fail (code 255), but still fails the build.

It would be great if cancellation (manual or automated) could be made to step fail and build pass. (soft-fail)

Prevent Slack Notifications When Cancelling a Buildkite Step
2

Hi @nikrollz and welcome to the forum!

The reason why cancellation is considered a hard fail is because it’s a direct action from the user.

What problem are you trying to solve with soft failures? If you can email support@buildkite.com with more details, we’d love to help you find a solution :)

3

Was this ever solved? I am trying to solve a very similar issue where we don’t want to send slack notification (configured in the buildkite UI) if a step is cancelled by running `buildkite-agent step cancel`, thank you

4

Hi @pavanrh basically for this, you can use soft_fail here. When a non-running step is cancelled, the exit_status is null, so you can do something like:

steps:
  - key: cancel-me
    soft_fail:
      - exit_status: "*"
    commands: |
      sleep 180
  - commands: |
      sleep 15
      buildkite-agent step cancel --step 'cancel-me'
    priority: 100

You can also simply use soft_fail: true. The downside here is that if the cancel-me step has a legitimate failure and exits with a non-zero status then it will also be marked as soft fail.