CircleCI no longer detects new branches that do not have PRs

Feedback & Bug Reports
1

I don’t know if this is related to the recent changes to the CircleCI pipelines page, but new branches that do not have PRs do not appear in the pipelines page, making it impossible to manually trigger pipeline builds.

I have “Only build pull requests” configured in our repository because I do not want CI to run on every branch. But it useful to be able to manually trigger CI on my branch before posting a pull request, so that I know that the build passes before asking for reviewer feedback. That workflow seems to not be supported anymore.

2

I believe this is a side effect of: CI Skip and Only build PRs will no longer create pipelines - CircleCI

One workaround is to use the run pipeline API: CircleCI API. This should let you trigger a pipeline even when the branch has not had any pipelines run on it yet.

cc @nathanwfish & @FernandoAbreu

1 Like
3

Thanks for the quick response, @sebastian-lerner.

It seems that this was intended to be a cosmetic change to reduce the number of entries in the list view. I do agree that the pipelines page is less cluttered now, but some useful functionality has been sacrificed.

Perhaps instead of suppressing their creation entirely, these pipelines can be tagged in such a way that they do not appear in the list view by default, but are still available with some extra navigation in the UI.

4

Thanks for the follow-up and for sharing your thoughts.

This change is more than cosmetic—it aligns with how other areas of our system handle pipeline creation and visibility. That said, I completely understand how it’s impacted your workflow, especially when trying to validate a branch before creating a PR.

For now, using the Run Pipeline API is the best way to manually trigger a build on a branch that hasn’t had any pipelines run. Alternatively, as you mentioned, you could open a PR and use [ci skip] for subsequent pushes until you’re ready to run the build.

We really appreciate you highlighting this use case. We’ve passed this along to our product team for consideration as we think about future improvements.