Dealing With Flakey CI Commands With a Retry Loop in Bash
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
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
- Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
- In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
- Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
- What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
- We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- The Gentle Singularity from Sam Altman
- Whale Watching from https://popagandhi.com/
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Pluralistic: Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (21 Jun 2025)
Today's links Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers': Far more than production gossip – an unmissable portrait of a turning point in American comedy and music. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 20…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow June 21, 2025Hiding metrics from the web
In 2012, artist Ben Grosser released a browser extension called Facebook Demetricator. Once installed, it hid all metrics from Facebook’s interface: likes, comments, notifications, unread messages, and so on. “What’s going on here is that these quantifica…
via Manual do Usuário June 21, 2025It's like surfing
The weird thing about engineering management is that you feel kinda useless. Yet if you stop, projects stop.
via swizec.com RSS Feed June 21, 2025Generated by openring