Can I skip an AWS CodePipeline build? - codeship

Question

I am currently developing a personal project on master. Every time I push to origin master a build is triggered on CodePipeline. As I am the only developer working on this project and don't want to bother with branches at this stage it would be nice to skip unnecessary builds. I wouldn't mind pushing to another branch, but it's a small annoyance.
CodeShip allows you to skip a build by including --skip-ci in your commit message. Is something like this possible with CodePipeline?
None of my Google searches have yielded results. The CodePipeline documentation makes no mention of such a feature either.

Answer 1

A valid reason for not wanting to build a certain commit is when you use CodeBuild to generate a commit for you. For example, I have some code on the master branch which passes all the tests. I then want to update the changelog, package.json version and create a git tag on a new commit and push it back to the CodeCommit repo.
If I do this on Codebuild, the version-commit triggers another build! Given the contents of the commit does not materially change the behaviour of the code, there is no need to build & test this commit.
Besides all of this, Amazon should be looking at the features in the marketplace and attempting to provide at least feature-parity. Adding a RegEx check for "skip-ci" to the CodeBuild trigger-code would take a few hours to implement, at most.

Answer 2

By default codepipeline creates a cloudwatch event which triggers your pipeline on all changes of the specific branch.
What you can do is to set this cloudwatch event to trigger a lambda function. This function can check whether it is necessary to build this commit and start your CodePipeline.
Here is an example of how to achieve this:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/adding-custom-logic-to-aws-codepipeline-with-aws-lambda-and-amazon-cloudwatch-events/
Here is a simple example for lambda function. It checks if the last commit has no [skip-CI] in its message and after that executes the pipeline.
Keep in mind, that this code checks only the last commit if your change was a series of commits you might want to check everything between oldCommitId and commitId.
const AWS = require('aws-sdk');
const codecommit = new AWS.CodeCommit();
const codepipeline = new AWS.CodePipeline();
exports.handler = async (event) => {
const { detail: { repositoryName, commitId, oldCommitId } } = event
const { commit } = await codecommit.getCommit({
commitId,
repositoryName
}).promise()
if(commit.message.search(/\[skip-CI\]/) === -1) {
const { pipelineExecutionId } = await codepipeline.startPipelineExecution({
name: 'your-pipeline-name'
}).promise()
console.log(`Pipeline have started. Execution id: ${pipelineExecutionId}!`)
} else {
console.log('Pipeline execution is not required')
}
return;
};

Answer 3

This isn't a feature offered by CodePipeline at this time.
I'd be curious to know why you view some builds as unnecessary. Do you push a sequence of commits and only want a build against the last commit? This may be more applicable in a team environment, but I would tend to want a build for every commit so I don't find myself in a situation where I push code and pick up and build someone else's broken code for the first time in my build.

Answer 4

I would suggest a manual review stage in your pipeline before it builds. Then you can just approve it when you are ready to build.