26 Mar 2020 · Software Engineering

    Keeping Logs Available When Rebuilding a Build

    2 min read
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    Flaky tests can be hard to track down. When you are working on a new feature, your builds can fail because of one or a few unrelated flaky tests. In this case a rebuild can help to make your build pass.

    Until now, a rebuild of a failed build replaced that build. This way, both the logs and the exact reason behind the failure becomes inaccessible for further inspection.

    Rebuild button now creates new builds

    To make debugging easier, we decided to to change the behaviour of the Rebuild button on Semaphore to ensure that developers still have access to information on failed builds after a rebuild.

    Instead of deleting the failed build and starting the build process from scratch, Semaphore now creates a new build with the same commits without affecting the original build. So, if you need to rebuild a revision because of a flaky test, you will now still have access to logs on previous failures, which you can use for later debugging.

    With the old rebuild flow, a failed build:

    was replaced with a new build:

    In the new rebuild flow, both the failed build and the new one are accessible:

    The new rebuild flow ensures that all your builds are preserved and accessible if necessary. We hope that this change will make debugging easier for you and your team.

    Happy building!

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    Writen by:
    Chief Architect at Semaphore. A decade of experience in dev productivity, helping close to 50,000 organizations with operational excellence.