Trigger Builds And Retry Failed Jobs Automatically With Buildkite

If your business ships software, every change your team makes has to be built, tested and released, and when something breaks, someone has to find out why and run it again. That loop is called continuous integration and delivery, or CI/CD. Buildkite runs it, and it exposes the whole thing through an API, so a chat bot, a release script, or an AI coding assistant can start builds, read the logs and retry failures without anyone logging in to a dashboard.

What Buildkite does

Buildkite is a hybrid CI/CD platform. Hybrid means Buildkite runs the control panel, while the agents that actually do the work run on machines you control, or on machines Buildkite hosts for you. It has three products, Pipelines, Test Engine and Package Registries, and offers a REST API, a GraphQL API, an Agent API, webhooks and an official MCP server that makes those APIs available to AI coding agents. More on the Buildkite website.

What you can get done

Run and manage builds

Buildkite’s work sits under one capability, Continuous Integration Management. A pipeline is the set of steps your code goes through; a build is one run of that pipeline; a job is one step inside a build.

• GET /organizations/{org}/pipelines lists your organization’s pipelines.
• POST /organizations/{org}/pipelines/{pipeline}/builds starts a new build, without anyone pushing code.
• GET /organizations/{org}/pipelines/{pipeline}/builds shows the recent builds of a pipeline.
• GET /organizations/{org}/pipelines/{pipeline}/builds/{number} tells you whether one build passed.
• PUT /organizations/{org}/pipelines/{pipeline}/builds/{number}/cancel stops a build that is still running.

Recover when something fails

The same capability handles the part that eats the most time: working out what broke and running it again.

• GET /organizations/{org}/pipelines/{pipeline}/builds/{number}/jobs/{job}/log fetches the log output of a job.
• PUT /organizations/{org}/pipelines/{pipeline}/builds/{number}/jobs/{job}/retry retries a single job.
• PUT /organizations/{org}/pipelines/{pipeline}/builds/{number}/rebuild re-runs an entire build with the same settings.

Workflows that put it together

A workflow is a recipe of several calls in order that finishes a real job. APIs.io catalogs 9 for Buildkite, including:

• Build Failure Triage inspects a finished build and pulls its annotations and artifacts.
• Retry Failed Job finds the failed job, retries it and watches the build to the end.
• Fetch Job Log reads a build, picks a finished job and fetches its log.
• Provision Pipeline And First Build creates a pipeline and triggers its first build.
• Stop Disconnected Agent finds an agent that has dropped off and stops it.

Ask for it in plain language

Our conversational overlay for Buildkite maps everyday questions to the operation that answers them, so an AI assistant knows which call to make. These are the kinds of things you can ask:

• “How do I trigger a new build through the Buildkite API?”
• “How do I see the recent builds of one of my pipelines?”
• “What’s the state of a specific build number?”
• “How do I cancel a build that’s still running?”

You can see one in the Agents phrasing overlay.

Getting started

Buildkite is paid, with self-serve signup, and it is a hosted service you call. Start with managing API tokens, then the GraphQL API, the GraphQL cookbook and the Agent API. On APIs.io, see the Buildkite profile, the MCP Server, the GraphQL API and the Agents API. If your team retries the same flaky job by hand every week, automate that retry first.