Buildkite

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Buildkite is SEEK’s CI/CD platform of choice. See Builds at SEEK for more information.

This topic details Buildkite integration features baked into skuba, as well as common issues faced when running your project on a Buildkite agent.

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Buildkite annotations

skuba can output issues detected by skuba lint as Buildkite annotations.

This can be enabled by propagating Buildkite environment variables and the buildkite-agent binary. For example, with the Docker Buildkite plugin:

steps:
  - command: pnpm lint
    plugins:
      - *aws-sm
      - *private-npm
      - *docker-ecr-cache
      - docker#v5.10.0:
          environment:
            - BUILDKITE_AGENT_ACCESS_TOKEN
          propagate-environment: true
          volumes:
            # Mount agent for Buildkite annotations.
            - /usr/bin/buildkite-agent:/usr/bin/buildkite-agent
            # Mount cached dependencies.
            - /workdir/node_modules

With Docker Compose, declare the environment variables and volume mounts in your Compose file:

services:
  app:
    volumes:
      - ./:/workdir
      # Mount agent for Buildkite annotations.
      - /usr/bin/buildkite-agent:/usr/bin/buildkite-agent
      # Mount cached dependencies.
      - /workdir/node_modules

and the environment and propagate-environment options in the Docker Compose Buildkite plugin:

steps:
  - command: pnpm lint
    plugins:
      - *aws-sm
      - *private-npm
      - *docker-ecr-cache
      - docker-compose#v5.2.0:
          environment:
            - BUILDKITE_AGENT_ACCESS_TOKEN
          propagate-environment: true
          run: app

This feature is also planned for skuba test in future.

skuba’s development API includes a Buildkite.annotate function. You can use this to create your own annotations from other JavaScript code running in your CI workflow.

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Buildkite agent exits with status -1

Scenario: you’re running a skuba command like skuba build-package or skuba lint, and observe the following error message on a Buildkite step:

Exited with status -1 (process killed or agent lost; see the timeline tab for more information)

Navigating to the Timeline tab reveals this:

Dispatcher Cancelled Job (+Xm)

Last Agent Heartbeat	Yesterday at 0:00:00.000 PM
Command Exit Status	-1 (Agent Lost)

Explanation: This implies that the step(s) exhausted the Buildkite agent’s resources. The agent may be tied up running a particularly compute- or memory-intensive step.

Options:

1. Pass the --serial flag to skuba build-package and skuba lint steps.

   This will cause them to run their underlying operations serially, reducing the chance of resource exhaustion.

   Note that this is automatically inferred for builds on SEEK’s central npm publishing pipeline.

2. Reduce the number of agents that run on each instance.

   At SEEK, this can be configured through BuildAgency.

3. Increase the instance size.

   At SEEK, this can be configured through BuildAgency.