Prioritize jobs for Bitbucket Pipelines?

[Derick Downey]

We develop software for an interior design program. It takes about 20 minutes to build the software. We have a localhosted Windows server as our only runner. I've set up a pipeline that does a "test build" of each pull request which is working great. The "test build" is just for developer feedback and does not get deployed anywhere. I've also set up a custom pipeline for actual "build + deploy" jobs. However, since we only have one runner, the "deploy" jobs get placed in the queue after all "test build" jobs. This means that if there's 3 "test build" jobs in the queue, it could take an hour before it begins the "deploy" job. Is there a way to prioritize jobs, so "deploy" pipelines always get moved up in the queue?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Interesting.

I don't think you can prioritize builds with Bitbucket Pipelines, but it sounds like a totally reasonable feature.

Maybe, if you distribute your jobs by their priorities to multiple runners, one for "High" priority and another for "Everything" else, then lower priority builds wouldn't block higher priority ones? :-?

[Derick Downey]

Thanks for the response Aron! Yeah, I am thinking any solution to this will require multiple runners... which will kind of be a shame if I have a runner sitting idle the vast majority of the time, when it could be sharing the load of the "build test" jobs. But that would mean deployment and other manually-triggered "high priority" jobs can run ASAP. I will continue to think about this and try to remember to reply here if I figure something out. Much appreciated again!

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Hmm, I am not sure if it worked for your use case, you can set concurrency limits per pipeline type:

• You can set max-parallel to 1 for test pipelines so they don’t overwhelm the queue.

• Keep deploy pipelines without this limit so they start as soon as a slot is open.

It may worth a try.