Announcing depends_on Support

We’re happy to share that Codeship Pro users can better control dependency boot order during builds by using depends_on inside your codeship-services.yml file. This means rather than links, you can now use depends_on to start your containers together, as you're likely used to if you’re familiar with using Docker Compose.

The Road to depends_on Support

If you’re one of the many people who has been asking for this, you may notice it has taken us a little while to get it done. We don’t mind being clear on why that is!

First, Docker (and the Moby project) had an eventful past year with lots of big changes that kept us busy keeping everything working as we responded to them and kept Docker current.

Second, we had to overhaul our container networking to create default, isolated networking so that we weren’t reliant on links for container communication. We did this back in December.

And, third -- while taking care of all of the above, we took a bit of a detour to really invest in our product, improve our ability to work on Pro, and commit to the highest quality foundation going forward we could. This means we did a big, tricky refactor, and you can read all about it here.

With all of that done, though, we’ve now shipped depends_on and are ready to keep shipping lots of awesome new things. Read a bit further down for the next thing!

The Future of Links

But what’s going to happen to links? Are they all broken and your builds don’t work anymore? Links are now officially deprecated, but your builds are fine.

We encourage you to update your files to begin using depends_on. Docker has marked links as a legacy feature at risk for removal as well. While we’ll maintain support for it in the short term, it’s best to start using depends_on.

Our Next Step with Healthchecks

With depends_on out there, we are turning our attention to healthchecks. Healthchecks will let you avoid annoying timing issues and arbitrary sleep commands by making sure a container is running before we begin to parse your steps. This is coming soon, so keep your eyes out for it and let us know if you’d like to be in the beta!

Jet upgrades, too!

In addition to the depends_on release, we have also released a new upgrade to our Jet CLI tool: jet update! This command will let you natively and quickly update your installed Jet CLI version.

To make the Jet CLI easier to use, we've also overhauled out Jet CLI documentation. Check it out here and let us know what you think.

Learn More

If you’d like to learn more about depends_on, you can read our documentation or view our reconfigured sample projects.