With this week's update we deliver one of the most requested features: the ability to debug errors directly in the pipeline.

Buddy lets you run tasks and commands in isolated containers with preinstalled frameworks and dependencies. When a build fails, it produces logs that you can use for debugging. However, sometimes the logs are not enough and the best method is debugging the error directly from the terminal. Now, you can launch such terminal in build containers from Buddy's UI with no additional configuration (such as with SSH keys).

New Features

• Terminal access to build containers – if a build action fails, you can now click Debug action in terminal to launch the container used in the action back online. At the moment, this feature is not available in the standalone version of Buddy

Improvements

• [Buddy On-premises] Added non-credential support to SMTP

Bugfixes

• [Kubernetes] Fixed a bug with listing namespaces in K8s actions on DigitalOcean clusters
• Fixed a bug with Missing from revision error at the beginning of an execution causing the entire pipeline to fail

We're proud to announce that today we released Sandboxes v2.0 as a closed beta! 🎉

In short, sandboxes are dynamically created staging environments. They allow developers to serve their application from the chosen branch, tag, or pull request on isolated VMs delivered by Buddy in a couple of clicks. As a result, you can preview and test any type of application without the need of bare-metal or cloud servers – from static sites to WordPress themes to multi-service Docker applications.

A website launched in sandbox

New Features

• Auto-retry mode in actions – you can now set how many times the pipeline should retry execution from the specified action and on what time intervals. This feature is available in the Options tab of the chosen action

Improvements

• New pipeline setting: Ignore errors in Prepare Environment step
• Service-specific ENV VARs are now available in the main container of build actions. For example, if your build has MongoDB attached, you will be able to use BUDDY_MONGO_DB_HOST, BUDDY_MONGO_DB_PORT, and other related variables in the main container
• Refreshed view of My-ID and standalone settings (on-premises only). This is a part of a bigger update to the GUI which is currently in the works
• If a pipeline with the Run next pipeline action is in progress and it's terminated, the execution of the child pipeline will also be terminated

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug with actions in the Back to normal section not launching if the pipeline was run from the Retry button and successfully finished

Improvements

• [FTP/SFTP] When using the Upload using temporary files option, the files will be uploaded with a tmp suffix and changed back to the original filename once the upload finishes. This setting is useful, for example, to improve the uptime of the website when uploading large files
• We have improved how changesets are calculated: if the deployment was successful, but the pipeline has failed, the next execution will now be properly counted from the deployed revision
• From now on, whenever you remove an action from the pipeline, its logs will not be removed from the executions tab
• Azure actions have been grouped into one section for easier navigation
• [Azure Storage] introduced settable content types for the uploaded files
• [YAML] It is now possible to use environment variables in source_project_name and source_pipeline_name fields of the Copy Files action

Bugfixes

• If actions were skipped in the On fail and Back to success sections, the remaining actions did not execute - fixed
• [Shopify Themekit CLI] Fixed a bug with commands provided in the Environment tab not working
• [YAML] Changing the action type caused parsing problems - fixed
• [Buddy On-Premises] Fixed a bug with download actions returning errors if the filesystem exceeded 10 GB

Improvements

• [WebDAV] If no protocol is specified in the action URL, Buddy will attempt connection via HTTP and HTTPS by default
• Variables will not be exported if they did not change their value during the execution
• If a settable variable exist in multiple scopes under the same name, then, during the execution, only the variable with the lowest scope will be set
• [Standalone] It is now possible to appoint a standalone administrator. The standalone administrator will be able to manage the instance settings (see the screenshot below)

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug with failed on failure and back to normal actions not interrupting the execution
• [YAML] Fixed a bug with the Web action failing during the response validation if text and text_existence were not sent
• [SSH] Fixed a bug with commented commands not being skipped in the line by line mode
• Improved error handling during repo synchronization

New Features

• New action: Deploy to Microsoft Azure Storage
• [Git Push] Added new functionalities: ability to push to integrated repositories without access credentials (GitHub & GitLab), ability to create and push new tags

Improvements

• [Slack] Added emoji support for Slack Blocks
• [SSH/SFTP] Buddy will now validate the remote path whenever the action is tested or executed
• Improved error messages when configuring atomic deployments
• [Microsoft Azure] Azure CLI, Azure Storage, and Azure AKS now use the same integration method
• [Amazon Web Services] Added support for new regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local), and EU (Milan)
• Buddy parameters have been deprecated for a long time, but they were still turned on by default in older pipelines. From now on, you can turn them off yourself in the project options

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug with Azure CLI and Shopify Theme Kit CLI not supporting the setup_commands field in the REST API/YAML
• Fixed a bug with the HTTP Request creating a new version of the pipeline upon saving despite no changes to the action
• Fixed a bug with the Google App Engine action failing whenever the source path contained a space