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
• Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (x86_64), supported to end of standard support for 26.04

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.

# Make sure you have Go installed.
brew install go

# Download the code somewhere - no GOPATH required.
git clone https://github.com/buildkite/agent.git
cd agent

# Create a temporary builds directory.
mkdir /tmp/buildkite-builds

# Build an agent binary and start the agent.
go build -o /usr/local/bin/buildkite-agent .
buildkite-agent start --debug --build-path=/tmp/buildkite-builds --token "abc"

# Or, run the agent directly and skip the build step.
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. The minimum compiler version is declared in go.mod. Use mise install to install the development toolchain pinned in mise.toml.

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/v4" 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

Tier 3, community supported

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.

Linux big-endian ppc64 binaries use the ELFv2 ABI and require Linux kernel 3.13 or later, or a kernel with ELFv2 support backported (such as RHEL 7's kernel). This change does not apply to ppc64le or other architectures.

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
  • CentOS 7
  • CentOS 8
• Amazon Linux 2
• macOS [^1]
  • 13 (Ventura)
  • 14 (Sonoma)
  • 15 (Sequoia)
  • 26 (Tahoe)
• Windows [^2]
  • 10
  • 11
  • Server 2016
  • Server 2019
  • Server 2022

[^1]: Binaries built from main with Go 1.27 require macOS 13 (Ventura) or later on both Intel (amd64) and Apple silicon (arm64). Older releases built with Go 1.26, including v4.7.0, remain compatible with macOS 12 (Monterey). See Supported macOS Versions for older-release compatibility and the pending release cutoff.

[^2]: See Go's Windows support page for Go / Windows version compatibility and Supported Windows Versions for the last supported version of the Buildkite Agent for versions of Windows prior to those listed above.

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.