CircleCI Concurrency Control Orb

CircleCI Orb to limit workflow concurrency.

Why? Some jobs (typically deployments) need to run sequentially and not parallel, but also run to completion. So CircleCI’s native auto-cancel is not quite the right fit. See https://github.com/eddiewebb/circleci-challenge as an example using blue/green cloud foundry deployments.

Basic Usage

This adds concurrency limits by ensuring any jobs with this step will only continue once no previous builds are running. It supports a single argument of how many minutes to wait before aborting itself and it requires a single Environment Variable CIRCLECI_API_KEY - which can be created in account settings.

Screenshots / Examples

Suppose we have a workflow take takes a little while to run. Normally the build (#18) will run immediately, with no queuing.

Someone else on the team makes another commit, since the first build (#18) is still running, it will queue build #19.

It’s late afternoon, everyone is pushing their commits in to ensure they are good before they leave for the day. Build #20 also queues.

Meanwhile, build #19 is now allowed to move forward since build #18 finished.

Oh No! Since 1 minute is abnormally long for things to be queued, build #20 aborts itself, letting build #19 finish uninterrupted.

Setup

See https://circleci.com/orbs/registry/orb/eddiewebb/queue#usage-examples for current examples

Note

Queueing is not supported on forked repos. If a queue from a fork happens the queue will immediately exit and the next step of the job will begin.