Buildkite Agent
The buildkite-agent is a small, reliable, and cross-platform build runner that
makes it easy to run automated builds on your own infrastructure. It’s main
responsibilities are polling buildkite.com for work,
running build jobs, reporting back the status code and output log of the job,
and uploading the job's artifacts.
Full documentation is available at
buildkite.com/docs/agent.
$ buildkite-agent --help
Usage:
buildkite-agent <command> [options...]
Available commands are:
acknowledgements Prints the licenses and notices of open source software incorporated into this software.
start Starts a Buildkite agent
annotate Annotate the build page within the Buildkite UI with text from within a Buildkite job
annotation Make changes to an annotation on the currently running build
artifact Upload/download artifacts from Buildkite jobs
env Process environment subcommands
lock Process lock subcommands
meta-data Get/set data from Buildkite jobs
oidc Interact with Buildkite OpenID Connect (OIDC)
pipeline Make changes to the pipeline of the currently running build
step Get or update an attribute of a build step
bootstrap Run a Buildkite job locally
help Shows a list of commands or help for one command
Use "buildkite-agent <command> --help" for more information about a command.
Dependencies
The agent is fairly portable and should run out of the box on most supported
platforms without extras. On Linux hosts it requires dbus
.
Installing
The agents page on Buildkite has
personalised instructions, or you can refer to
the Buildkite docs. Both
cover installing the agent with Ubuntu (via apt), Debian (via apt), macOS (via
homebrew), Windows and Linux.
Docker
We also support and publish
Docker Images for the following
operating systems. Docker images are tagged using the agent SemVer components
followed by the operating system.
For example, agent version 3.45.6 is published as:
- 3-ubuntu-20.04, tracks minor and bugfix updates in version 3 installed in
Ubuntu 20.04
- 3.45-ubuntu-20.04, tracks bugfix updates in version 3.45 installed in Ubuntu
20.04
- 3.45.6-ubuntu-20.04, tracks the exact version installed in Ubuntu 20.04
Supported operating systems
- Alpine 3.18
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (x86_64), supported to end of standard support for 20.04
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (x86_64), supported to end of standard support for 22.04
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (x86_64), supported to end of standard support for 24.04
Starting
To start an agent all you need is your agent token, which you can find on your
Agents page within Buildkite, and a build path. For example:
buildkite-agent start --token=<your token> --build-path=/tmp/buildkite-builds
Telemetry
By default, the agent sends some information back to the Buildkite mothership on
what features are in use on that agent. Nothing sensitive or identifying is sent
back to Buildkite, but if you want, you can disable this feature reporting by
adding the --no-feature-reporting
flag to your buildkite-agent start
call.
Features that we track can be found inside
AgentStartConfig.Features.
Development
These instructions assume you are running a recent macOS, but could easily be
adapted to Linux and Windows.
brew install go
git clone https://github.com/buildkite/agent.git
cd agent
mkdir /tmp/buildkite-builds
go build -o /usr/local/bin/buildkite-agent .
buildkite-agent start --debug --build-path=/tmp/buildkite-builds --token "abc"
go run *.go start --debug --build-path=/tmp/buildkite-builds --token "abc"
Go Version and Dependency Management
The latest agent version is typically compiled with the highest-numbered stable
release of Go. Previous Go versions may work, but are not guaranteed to. We are
using newer language features such as generics, so compiling on Go < 1.18 will
fail.
We're using Go Modules to manage
our Go dependencies. Dependencies are not
vendored into the repository unless
necessary.
The Go module published by this repo (i.e. the one you could use by adding import "github.com/buildkite/agent/v3"
to your code)
is not considered to be versioned using semantic versioning. Breaking changes may be introduced in minor releases. Use
the agent as a runtime depedency of your Go app at your own risk.
Platform Support
We provide support for security and bug fixes on the current major release
only.
Our architecture and operating system support is primarily limited by
what Go itself supports.
Architecture Support
We offer support for the following machine architectures (inspired by the Rust
language platform support guidance).
Tier 1, guaranteed to work
- linux x86_64
- linux arm64
- windows x86_64
Tier 2, guaranteed to build
- linux x86
- windows x86
- darwin x86_64
- darwin arm64
We release binaries for various other platforms, and it should be possible to
build the agent anywhere supported by Go, but official support is not provided
for these Tier 3 platforms.
Operating System Support
We currently provide support for running the Buildkite Agent on the following
operating systems. Future minor releases may drop support for end-of-life
operating systems (typically as they become unsupported by the latest stable Go
release).
The agent binary is fairly portable and should run out of the box on most UNIX
like systems, as well as Windows.
- Ubuntu 20.04 and newer
- Debian 8 and newer
- Red Hat RHEL 7 and newer
- CentOS
- Amazon Linux 2
- macOS 1
- 10.15 (Catalina)
- 11 (Big Sur)
- 12 (Monterey)
- 13 (Ventura)
- 14 (Sonoma)
- Windows Server
Contributing
See ./CONTRIBUTING.md
Contributors
Many thanks to
our fine contributors!
You're all amazing, and we greatly appreciate your input ❤️
Copyright
Copyright (c) 2014-2023 Buildkite Pty Ltd.
See LICENSE for details.