Before Upgrading

See the CircleCI server 4.6 release notes and upgrade guide for this release.

NOTE: Vault is being deprecated and will no longer be supported in server 5.0. Refer to our script for steps to migrate to Tink.

What’s New in Release 4.6.0

The v4.6 release introduces various UI refreshments and improvements.

NEW FEATURES

• Several enhancements to the CircleCI web app, including:
  • A new “User Homepage”.
  • Updated styling for the left-hand navigation bar.
  • Top navigation bar that allows easy access to user-level actions.
• Pipelines are now labeled whenever they are rerun from start or fail, or with SSH.
• Project-based context restrictions. For more information see the docs.

CHANGES

• Old, expired workflows are now automatically canceled after 90 days.
• The pipeline.in_setup pipeline parameter has been removed.
• Kong, which is used for server API management, has been upgraded from 2.x to 3.x.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a bug that prevented jobs from being rerun with SSH.
• Resolved an issue that prevented project loading on the Insights dashboard.
• Addressed regressions from server 4.2:
  • Introduced a configuration option at the organization level to set the default resource class for a Docker job. In server 4.3, this was previously hardcoded to large.
  • Added support for absolute paths in defining a GCP network under the machine provisioner configuration. This feature is particularly useful for VM jobs using shared networks, enabling explicit network selection. This corrects a regression from the previous VM service architecture.

NEW SERVICES

New services introduced with this release:

• authentication-service - provides an interface for user and identity management in the CircleCI system

DATABASE MIGRATIONS

The following databases will run migrations when upgrading to this version:

• builds_service
• conductor_production
• permissions

KNOWN ISSUES

• SSH reruns in air-gap will time out, leaving the job in an error state
• Vault may not refresh its client token after a month of uptime. Migrate to Tink to resolve this issue.
• Retry with SSH for jobs using the machine executor advertises a private IP address. For this reason, retry with SSH for jobs using the machine executor works as standard for public installations, but for private installs you would need to ensure that you can access the private IP advertised. For example, by using a VPN into your VPC.
• CircleCI 1.0 builds are not supported. If an attempt is made to run a 1.0 build, no feedback will be available in the application to indicate the cause of the issue. If a build is run on your installation and does not show up in the CircleCI application, use the CircleCI CLI to validate the project configuration and get details of the possible cause of the issue.
• Open ID Connect Tokens are not generated and not available.

To learn more about Server 4.6 installation, migration, or operations please review our documentation.

CircleCI server v4.0.0 is now generally available. The feature set for this release are equal to server v3.x. The installation and upgrade processes for v4.x have changed significantly.

Server v4.x offers greatly improved security handling, installation, and update processes. Server v4.x is installed using helm charts and images that can be pulled ahead of time to comply with your security processes. Installation processes can also use artifacts pulled from customer-managed registries. Server v4.x makes improved use of Kubernetes secrets and removes the requirement to grant permissions and network access to third-party tools.

Before upgrading

See the CircleCI server 4.x release notes for upgrade notes for this release.

What’s new in release 4.0.0

New features

• Two new Arm resource classes are now available xlarge and 2xlarge. For more information on using Arm, see the Arm docs.
• CircleCI server v4.x images and helm charts are available for licenced users.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that was causing a huge quantity of error logs in the distributer-internal pod.
• Prometheus is no longer included by default in CircleCI server v4.x.
• The default concurrency limit has been increased to avoid it being reached.
• Docker layer caching volumes are now deleted after 3 days if unused. Previously they were deleted after 7 days.
• kong is now placed behind NGINX to simplify loadbalancer setup.
• The loadbalancer has been renamed from circleci-traefik to circleci-proxy.
• Workflow configurations that are stored in PostgreSQL will migrated to the Object Storage.

Known issues

• Telegraf needs to have its configuration overwritten and base64 encoded.
• When migrating from 3.x to 4.x, workflow configuration migrations will run as an init job and the workflows-conductor-event-consumer and the workflows-conductor-grpc-handler pods will not start until the migration completes. Customers with large PostgreSQL databases should plan accordingly. Migration time can be reduced by scaling the workflow-conductor pods.
• Webhook-service may not work with an externalized Vault.
• Vault may not refresh its client token after a month of uptime.
• Retry with SSH for jobs using the machine executor advertises a private IP address. For this reason, retry with SSH for jobs using the machine executor works as standard for public installations, but for private installs you would need to ensure that you can access the private IP advertised. For example, by using a VPN into your VPC.
• CircleCI 1.0 builds are not supported. If an attempt is made to run a 1.0 build, no feedback will be available in the application to indicate the cause of the issue. If a build is run on your installation and does not show up in the CircleCI application, users should be directed to use the CircleCI CLI to validate the project configuration and get details of the possible cause of the issue.

To learn more about Server 4.x installation, migration, or operations please see our documentation.

What’s New in Release 3.0.0

Server 3.0 is now generally available. The newest version of server offers the ability to scale under heavy workloads, all within your own Kubernetes cluster and private network, while still enjoying the full CircleCI cloud experience. Server 3.0 includes the latest CircleCI features, such as orbs, scheduled workflows, matrix jobs, and more. For existing customers interested in migrating from 2.19 to 3.x, contact your customer success manager. Server 3.0 will receive monthly patch releases and quarterly feature releases.

New Features

• New UI
• Orbs for Server
• Pipelines
• Config 2.1
• API 2.0
• Scheduled Workflows
• Matrix Jobs
• And much more…

Known Issues

• No support for external data stores (Postgres, Mongo, Vault). This feature will be implemented in a future release.
• It is currently possible for multiple organizations under the same CircleCI server account to have contexts with identical names. This should be avoided as doing so could lead to errors and unexpected behavior. This will be fixed in a future patch release.
• CircleCI 1.0 builds are not supported. If an attempt is made to run a 1.0 build, no feedback will be available in the application to indicate the cause of the issue. If a build is run on your installation and does not show up in the CircleCI application, users should be directed to use the CircleCI CLI to validate the project configuration and get details of the possible cause of the issue.
• CircleCI currently assigns a public load balancer for the frontend services. For some customers, their infrastructure or security groups won’t allow this. We will provide an optional internal local balancer for the frontend services in a future release.
• Telegraf metrics collection customization is not yet available.
• Support for GPU builders is not yet available.

To learn more about Server 3.0 installation, migration, or operations please see our documentation.

CircleCI 2.0 is a completely updated CI/CD platform that starts every run with a clean image which is automatically provisioned just-in-time for Linux jobs on the CircleCI application installed in your private cloud. The CircleCI 2.0 platform includes significant performance, stability, and reliability improvements along with first-class Docker support, Workflows (pipelines), Resource Allocation, and Contexts. The Management Console (Replicated) also includes new options for enabling 2.0 Builders and appropriate default settings.

If you have CircleCI installed you may access CircleCI 2.0 features on your current installation with no restrictions under your current agreement and support level. However, you must contact your CircleCI account representative for assistance with upgrading, to obtain migration scripts, and to receive a new license channel.

• CircleCI 2.0.0 is only available on AWS and may be installed with Terraform or manually.
• Teams may create a CircleCI 2.0 .circleci/config.yml file in their repositories to add new 2.0 projects incrementally while continuing to build 1.0 projects which use a circle.yml configuration file.

Documentation for the installable 2.0 application is available at CircleCI 2.0 Documentation for the following topics:

• Administrator’s Overview
• Administration FAQ
• Security Features
• Installing CircleCI 2.0 on Amazon Web Services with Terraform
• Configuring High Availability
• Administrative Variables, Monitoring, and Logging
• Introduction to Nomad Cluster Operation
• Backing up CircleCI Data