Semaphore v1.3 Release Roundup: A Big Leap for Contributors and Small Teams 🚀

We’re excited to share what’s new in Semaphore v1.3 — a release focused on empowering contributors, improving the local development experience, and making advanced CI/CD features more accessible to small teams.

Whether you’re looking to make your first contribution or run Semaphore in your organization, this update brings significant improvements across the board.

Contributing Just Got a Lot Easier

Since open-sourcing Semaphore, we’ve welcomed contributions, but we knew the developer experience needed refinement. With v1.3, we’ve made that process much smoother:

• Forked PRs now trigger CI automatically
  No more waiting for manual approvals from our team to run tests. As soon as you open a pull request, CI/CD kicks in.
• Public access to pipeline jobs
  You can now inspect test results and logs from your fork, making debugging and iteration significantly easier.
• Improved contributor documentation
  Our DEVELOPMENT.md and CONTRIBUTING.md files now explain everything from tooling to branch naming conventions and commit message formatting.
• Local development with Scaffold
  You can now run Semaphore locally using Skaffold. We’ve consolidated our microservices to reduce the resource footprint to around 7GB RAM and 5 CPUs — and we’re actively working on lowering it even more.

First-Time Contributors Spotlight

We’re thrilled to welcome two new external contributors:

• Michał Matyas fixed a timestamp formatting issue in the activity monitor UI.
• Fred resolved a YAML switching bug in our visual editor and fixed typos in the getting started guide.

Thank you both! 🙌

You can find more opportunities labeled as good first issue on our GitHub board. These are ideal if you’re looking to get familiar with our codebase.

Better Workflow Navigation & Filtering

We’ve improved how you browse workflow history:

• Stateful pagination
  The URL now retains your place when navigating between pages or sharing links.
• Date-based filtering
  You can filter workflows by specific date ranges — helpful when tracking down long-running or historical builds.

Announcing the Semaphore Enterprise Edition — Free for Small Teams

We’re introducing a new Enterprise Edition of Semaphore. And it’s free for small teams!

If your company has:

• Fewer than 50 employees
• Less than $5M in annual recurring revenue

You can use the full power of Semaphore, including advanced RBAC and compliance features, at no cost. Just install the Enterprise edition using Helm and request a free license key. More details in our Enterprise Edition docs.

🐛 Coming Soon: Bug Bounties via Algora

We’re also launching a bug bounty program in partnership with Algora.io. You’ll soon be able to earn rewards for fixing issues and contributing features. Keep an eye on our GitHub and README for the official launch.

🔭 What’s Next in v1.4?

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming:

• Partial pipeline rebuilds via the UI
  Already available through our API, this long-requested feature is making its way into the UI.
• Further local dev optimizations
  We’re aiming to bring down CPU and memory requirements even more.
• More good-first-issues
  Expect a growing list of approachable tasks for new contributors.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release — both inside and outside the Semaphore team. Version 1.3 is a major step toward making Semaphore easier to contribute to and more accessible to a wider community.

If you haven’t already, check out the repo, give us a ⭐, and let us know what you think.

Happy building!