It's here! After 41 betas and almost a year of development, our new agents have finally hit stable. Thanks so much to everyone that contributed, filed issues, and was patient with us as we developed 2.0.
Buildkite Agent 2.0 can now easily scale across as many machines, instances or containers as you wish. You can also add hooks to override and extend the built-in behaviour and events. And new webhooks and REST API endpoints allow you to create any automation workflow you need.
You may be wondering "Why'd they skip 1.0?" - mainly because in retrospect - we should have put a 1.0 sooner - since so many people are already using the beta agents in production. They were perfectly stable - we just didn't want to ship them to the stable channels until we were ready. And since that took so long, we've decided to consider the betas 1.0 and go straight to 2.0.
What's new?
Here's a brief summary of what's been added to the agent. You can read more about them in the newly revamped Buildkite Agent docs: https://buildkite.com/docs/agent/upgrading-to-v2
- The binary name has changed from
buildboxtobuildkite-agent - The default install location has changed from
~/.buildboxto~/.buildkite-agent(although each installer may install in different locations) - Agents can be configured with a config file
- Agents register themselves with a organization-wide token, you no longer need to create them via the web
- Agents now have hooks support and there should be no reason to customise the bootstrap.sh file
- There is built-in support for containerizing builds with Docker and Docker Compose
- Windows support
- There are installer packages available for most systems
- Agents now have meta-data
- Build steps select agents using key/value patterns rather than explicit agent selection
- Automatic ssh fingerprint verification
- Ability to specify commands such as
rakeandmakeinstead of a path to a script - Agent meta data can be imported from EC2 tags
- You can set a priority for the agent
- The agent now works better under flakey internet connections by retrying certain API calls
- A new command
buildkite-agent artifact shasumthat allows you to download the shasum of a previously uploaded artifact - Various bug fixes and performance enhancements
- Support for storing build pipelines in repositories
Deprecating the old agents
We'll be deprecating all agents prior to 2.0 on the 12th December, 2015. This is the date that we'll be turning off all the old Buildbox domains, and rejecting agent connections from these older agents.
Upgrading from 0.1 or 0.2
If you're upgrading from on of our older (and soon to be deprecated) agents, then head on over to https://buildkite.com/docs/agent/installation to learn more about installing the new agents. We've created packages for each of the major OS's so installing should be easy!
Upgrading from the 1.0-beta.x
Ubuntu / Debian
If you've installed the agent using the debian package, edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/buildkite-agent.list and change word unstable (or experimental if it's there) to stable, then run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Red Hat / CentOS
If you've installed the agent using the rpm package, edit /etc/yum.repos.d/buildkite-agent.repo and change word unstable (or experimental if it's there) stable, then run sudo yum clean expire-cache && sudo yum update buildkite-agent
Other
If you didn't install the agent using the deb/rpm package, just update the agent like you normally would, and you should get the latest stable version!