Auto-canceling builds when pushing to the same branch twice¶

Read the Docs allows you to keep your documentation up to date in a simple way, by triggering a new build each time developers push a git repository. Depending on your workflow, there could be situations where multiple pushes are done during a short time window. This causes a situation where you have to wait a long time for a build that will be immediately overwritten.

To avoid waiting for those builds to be executed, we implemented a new feature to cancel these useless builds and only execute the latest one. This considerably improves the user experience and also reduces resource costs and energy waste.

More than a month ago, we enabled this feature for a subset of projects to do a small test before rolling it out to all the projects. In the past month, we have cancelled around 5k builds due to this reason on this subset of projects. The following plot shows cancelled builds per day in the last 2 months. Before August 29th, when this feature was enabled, only manually canceled builds are shown. After enabling the feature and adding it to some projects, we can notice an increase of cancelled builds. Besides, on October 3rd we enabled it for all the projects, which is reflected on the plot showing a peak on it:

Today, we are happy to announce that we are enabling this feature for all the projects. We have received really good feedback from our test users, particularly around the user experience when triggering multiple builds frequently.

We appreciate the feedback that our test users gave us, and we’re excited to roll this out to all our users. Please let us know if you any new issues around cancelled builds as we roll out this feature more widely.