Welcome to the Semaphore blog! We’ve realized that it’s time to separate from the Rendered Text blog, where we’ll continue to share other news and engineering stories from the company.

As our service continues to grow, we’re seeing more and more companies coming aboard with developers working on many branches simultaneously. If we combine that with the possibility of running tests in parallel, it becomes clear that we need to offer more.

We’re very excited to see command-line tools and libraries being developed on top of Semaphore API. Aleksandar Diklić, who has joined Rendered Text recently, hacked a script which eventually became available as semaphore-status:

Since the launch of parallelism, we’ve seen many users embrace the ease of splitting their builds into threads. We had set a limit of up to two threads per build, to learn how people use them and make sure our platform handles everything without problems.

One of the goals we had with the [recent platform upgrade][platformupgrade] was to have the infrastructure in place so that we can allow all customers to install additional software and tweak configuration settings by themselves.

Today we’ve rolled out an upgrade to the Semaphore build platform based on the latest Ubuntu LTS (12.04). This means that versions of pretty much everything went up. Check out our version information page for details.

Sometimes when you’re using Semaphore you want to skip building some commits or branches. Here’s how you can easily accomplish that.

We’re very excited to announce that build parallelization in Semaphore is now available to all trial users and customers with Pro 2 plan and higher.

Today we’re pleased to announce two more methods in Semaphore API: one for listing all projects that you have access to, and another that returns full branch history.

Making it easy to set up build notifications on Semaphore has always been important to us. So far when we’d add a new notification type, we’d create a new tab for it in project settings. We knew that won’t work well forever, and time has come for change:

It’s been a while since we’ve announced the availability of build status API on Twitter. Here I’d like to let you know what it is exactly at the moment and what we plan to do in the future.

Hot on the heels of GitHub’s announcement of Commit Status API, we’re pleased to say that we stayed some extra time in the office and shipped it in Semaphore.

Since we started the Semaphore project, we’ve always strived to come up with a good design. Continuous integration (CI) was not a new concept, but we saw a lot of room for improvement in how it’s done. We hoped that eventually more projects will use CI, which would benefit our entire industry. For example, with […]

Semaphore, our hosted continuous integration service, is being continuously improved. Here are the highlights of what’s new since our last post. Build environment improvements We’ve upgraded our build environment, making PhantomJS, Java, Sphinx and Memcache, among others, available out of the box. There’s a more complete list on our documentation site, and we know quite […]

Hot on the heels of Semaphore’s public launch, we’ve shipped two important and frequently requested features so far: Campfire notifications and support for different versions of Ruby.