Enabling CircleCI 2.1

[zdennis]

This may be a naive question and hopefully I didn’t miss the answer when searching the forums or the official docs, but how does one enable CircleCI 2.1?

Do you have to Enable Pipelines in order to get it? Since enabling pipelines seems to affect the build/trigger API and is not fully backwards compatible I’d love to find out if 2.1 can be enabled without it.

Once enabled, can you still use 2.0 configuration on other branches? I assume yes, but it’s not entirely clear. We’d like to try out some new 2.1 configuration stuff, but are leary that enabling it will affect other jobs.

Last question related: right now if I push a branch with a 2.1 configuration (that validates with circleci config validate ... that commit/build never shows up in the CircleCI UI as a potential build. I assume this is telling me that 2.1 isn’t enabled for us, but I’m not entirely sure.

Thanks for any insight or information you can provide.

[stella]

Hi @zdennis ,

Enable Pipelines is required to be able to build 2.1 configurations.

If you would like to test things out without committing to enabling pipelines, I would recommend creating a temporary repository on GitHub/Bitbucket which is a clone of your current one, and then following it on CircleCI. New projects added to CircleCI automatically have the Enable Pipelines setting set to true.
This would allow you to play around with 2.1 features without affecting your current project.

With pipelines enabled, you can still have branches that use 2.0 configuration.

[zdennis]

Thank you @stella!