Curious why the re-run workflow has been made so painful?

I am a long time fan of CircleCI but some recent changes especially the one that makes “reruns” impossible unless you wrap it up in a circleci tests run --comand make little sense to me

Two weeks ago if I had a job out of multiple jobs fail I could just click on “re-run failing tests”; and stuff would just run. Or if I was curious what was going on in the box I could do “rerun with ssh” and that would just work as well

As of a few days ago both of these options are greyed out for me on all of my projects; the rerun with SSH button has no follow up while the rerun failed tests leads me to your documentation which I can’t link on this forum; which talks about wrapping up everything which feels like a lot of effort for a large YAML file

Whats worse is that there are some things that randomly fail that cause test failures; say apt isn’t working for some reason; now I have to wrap up those commands as well.

Can we get the old workflow back please?

@gyani Sorry about that, we have not changed anything recently with respect to the “rerun” dropdown that I’m aware of.

If the “rerun failed tests” button used to be clickable but now sends you to docs, can you check and see if the .circleci/config.yml file changed? The “rerun failed tests” is only clickable to rerun failed tests if circleci tests run is present in the .circleci.config.yml file and store_test_results is present. Else, it will send to docs to set up the feature. I’m wondering if there was a change to the configuration file that is causing one of those two prerequisites to no longer be true.

“Rerun workflow from failed” should always be clickable without any need to make any changes to your configuration file. Are you talking about “rerun failed tests” or “rerun workflow from failed”?

hey @sebastian-lerner In the repository I was looking at today there are no calls to circleci the only cli we use is circlieci-agent for step halt;

There are no store_test_results either

I have created a dummy PR on kurtosis-tech/ethereum-package (PR 415) showing this ; fairly simple config.yml; ; this has the same “setup rerun tests” behavior on circle ci. There’s no agent halt in this repo

I can’t upload images or links though;

Yeah, I guess what I’m trying to say is that “rerun failed tests” will ONLY work if you have circleci tests run && store_test_results. So if in your repo you don’t have both of those, it is expectetd that the “re-run failed tests” option takes you to the docs.

Are you saying that you have a repo that previously had the option “rerun failed tests” in the UI, but never had circleci tests run && store_test_results?

Oh I get you now; that was my interpretation of the docs as well

Yes, the same projects with more or less the same config.yml had the re-run and re-run with ssh feature and never used circleci tests run; and about two weeks ago this changed

Strange, sorry about that. I’ll look into it with the team. But what you’re seeing now is expected. To be able to use “rerun failed tests”, circleci tests run must be present. Else, the rerun dropdown will say “setup rerun failed tests” and take you to docs.

“rerun workflow from failed” and “rerun with ssh” have no connection to circleci tests run. So if you’re seeing flakiness with those being not present, feel free to send me a job link where you’re seeing a case where you think one of those two should be clickable but they’re not: sebastian@circleci.com

Thank you Sebastian!

I have sent you an email. The rerun with ssh and rerun workflow from failed is the thing thats changed; hovering over it I can see it now says “you need write permissions”. Maybe Circle introduced a new model or someone in the organization messed something up.

This was totally my fault; I wasn’t logged in to Circle. Maybe we can make some UX change that illustrates you aren’t logged in!

The other two people weren’t logged in either.

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Ah, glad we got to the bottom of it. I’ll pass this feedback along to my peers to see if we can make the UX a little more obvious.