Bitbucket Pipelines build was not triggered for a particular commit

Summary

This article will discuss possible causes and provide troubleshooting tips when the a Bitbucket Cloud Pipeline build was not triggered for a particular commit.

Cause

Possible causes for this are the following:

• There may be no definition on the bitbucket-pipelines.yml file that matches the branch that is receiving a Git push.

• The push might have more than 5 references(branches, tags).

• The push contained multiple commits. Pipelines will only trigger builds for the HEAD of the current Git push, meaning that if a user pushes their commits together, only the latest commit will trigger a build.

• The commit that should have triggered the build may have the text [skip ci] or [ci skip] in its commit message.

• The size of the webhook that should have triggered the Pipelines build may be larger than 256 Kb.

Solution

The solution depends on the cause:

1. Open the repository on Bitbucket's website, select Source from the left sidebar, and then, in the dropdown right above the list of files, select the branch for which you expect the Pipelines build to be triggered (this is necessary because we want to check the bitbucket-pipelines.yml file on that branch specifically).

   1. Check if a file named bitbucket-pipelines.yml exists on this branch. This file may exist on the repo's main branch, but it may not exist on some other branches.

      • If it exists, ensure that the spelling of the file name is correct.

      • If it doesn't exist, you will need to create it and configure it. Please check the Bitbucket Pipelines configuration reference.

   2. Open the bitbucket-pipelines.yml file and check if there is a pipeline definition that matches the name of the branch.

      • If there is, ensure there are no spelling mistakes in the branch name or other keywords.

      • If there isn't, you'll need to configure a pipeline for this branch. Please check the Bitbucket Pipelines configuration reference.

2. Check the output of the git push command you made (either on the terminal or on the Git GUI client you use) and verify if you pushed more than 5 references (branches and/or tags). Pipelines will not run a build if there are more than 5 references on the same push (branches, tags) as documented on the Limitations of Bitbucket Pipelines.

   • You can manually trigger a build if you want, see section Manually trigger a Pipelines build at the bottom of this article.

   • To prevent this issue from occurring again, reduce the number of references (branches, tags) in a single push so that it's 5 or less.

3. If your push contained more than one commit and a build was triggered for the latest commit, this is the default behavior by Pipelines. If you want to run a build for an earlier commit, you can do it the following way:

   • Open the Commits page of the repo and then select the specific commit for which you want to trigger a build. Then, select Run pipeline (from the bottom right corner of the screen).

4. Open the repository on Bitbucket's website and select the Commits page from the left sidebar. Find the commit that should have triggered the build, and check if the text [skip ci] or [ci skip] is added to the commit message. This text is used when a user wants to skip a build for a specific push.

   • You can manually trigger a build if you want, see section Manually triggering a Pipelines build of this article.

5. Automated Pipeline builds are triggered on push by a webhook. The webhook payload is limited to 256 KB. If the payload of your webhook is larger than that, then the webhook and your Pipelines build will not get triggered. At the moment, there is no way for a customer to verify the webhook payload size, this can only be done by the Atlassian support team. A large webhook payload may be caused by large commit messages of the commits included in a push, or by a large pull request description (for pull-requests builds).

   • You can manually trigger a build, see the section Manually trigger a Pipelines build at the bottom of this article.

   • To prevent this issue from occurring again, try not to use very large commit messages or PR descriptions.

If you believe that none of these possible causes apply to your use case, raise a Support Ticket and share the commit that didn’t trigger the Pipeline build.

Manually trigger a Pipelines build

You can manually trigger a build in one of the following ways:

• From the Pipelines page of the repo, using the button Run pipeline (near the top right corner).

• From the Branches page of the repo, selecting the 3 dots under the Actions column for branch > Run pipeline for a branch.

• From the Commits page of the repo, by opening the page of a specific commit and then selecting Run pipeline (bottom right corner of the screen).