Dealing With Flakey CI Commands With a Retry Loop in Bash

| ci | devops |

One of the most frustrating things to deal with in Continuous Integration is flakey commands. Whether it’s flakey tests, or intermittent networking issues, when your build fails for issues outside of your control not only does it cause frustration, it reduces the trust in your CI process.

One strategy for dealing with this type of issue is to introduce some retry logic into your commands. This can easily be accomplished with good old bash.

For example, pretend that I have $FLAKEY_COMMAND and I want to retry it three times before finally failing my build. I could wrap the whole thing up in a bash loop like this.

counter=1
max=3
$FLAKEY_COMMAND

while [[ $? -ne 0 && $counter -lt $max ]]; do
    counter=$((counter+1))
    $FLAKEY_COMMAND
done

This script will run my command, if the exit code (the output of $?) is non zero (i.e something went wrong) and my counter is less than three, then it will retry the command. You can increase or decrease the number of attempts by adjusting the max variable.

This is not a foolproof strategy, but is one approach to handle flakey commands in your CI pipeline.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Issue 102 – The public will pay

Justin Sun buys his way out of an SEC fraud case, Iranian transactions on Binance draw DOJ scrutiny as the exchange sues the newspaper that reported on them, and crypto super PACs dump millions into Tuesday’s primaries in Illinois.

via Citation Needed March 16, 2026

Back in February I bought a four-wheeler and I’ve been having a lot of fun putting in some miles, adding accessories, and being outdoors. It is a 2026 Polaris Sportsman. A great way to end winter. It affords me to get to locations to do some photography t…

via Colin Devroe March 16, 2026

Fine Specimens by Elliot Jay Stocks

A curated collection of the best in contemporary type design Elliot is back with a new typography book! Elliot Jay Stocks

via Blog – Brad Frost March 16, 2026

Generated by openring