Introducing Terminal Jobs!

Build Environment
1

Hello CircleCI community, we have a new exciting feature to announce based on your feedback!

Today, if an upstream job is blocked and never runs, any downstream job depending on it is stuck — there’s no clean way to say “run this job once everything upstream is done, regardless of the outcome.” This leads to orphaned resources or messy config duplications when trying to implement a workaround.

We’re introducing two new job statuses that downstream jobs can depend on to solve this:

not_run — you can now explicitly condition downstream jobs on not_run, allowing cleanup and fallback jobs to fire whenever an upstream job did not execute.

terminal — an aggregate status that resolves to true when a job has reached any final state: success, failed, canceled, or not_run. Instead of enumerating every possible outcome, you can simply require a job to be terminal.

Here is an example:

workflows:
  test:
    jobs:
      - set-up-test-database   
      - run-tests:
          requires:
            - set-up-test-database
      - delete-test-database:
          requires:
            - run-tests: terminal  # Runs regardless of outcome

Now, delete-test-database always runs once “run-tests” job have reached a terminal state — whether it succeeded, failed, were canceled, or never ran at all.

For more details, visit the documentation.

Please don’t hesitate on sharing your experiences by replying to this post! We’d love to hear more about how you are using terminal/not_run jobs, how it is bringing value to your organization or what limitations/issues you ran into.