Workflows triggered from "Bitrise Build Start" don't clone the triggering machine

[nick.teissler]

Description of the issue

I’m trying to achieve a flow shown below:

My trigger starts the “setup” workflow which git clones and installs my projects external dependencies. At that point I want to branch off into 4 or 5 different parallel test workflow (We have 10+ concurrencies). I want each of the parallel workflows to run in an environment identical to the “setup” workflow. i.e. The code is there, my ruby version is there, and a couple of brew installs from “setup” are there.

The problem is it looks like each workflow started by “setup” runs in a clean, new VM. I found this post: How to trigger multiple workflows at the same time - #19 by nick.teissler which says that clean vm’s used to be the way things were done in the past. And I’m following this tutorial: https://blog.bitrise.io/start-multiple-builds-with-the-same-trigger which says that

‘Bitrise Build Start’ step
This step will clone the build it is running in , but with another workflow(s) you’ve already defined and then it’ll start running these in parallel and not in succession.

Environment:

If on Bitrise.io: which stack? If not on Bitrise.io: on what operating system? (Plus any other information you can share)

Xcode 10.2.x macOS 14
Step: Bitrise Start Build
v 0.11.3

Reproducibility

Every time, the step fails to clone the build it is running in.

• Does a “Rebuild” help? (You can trigger a rebuild from the Build’s page, by clicking the “Rebuild” button in the top right corner of a finished build) : NO
• Does a rebuild without caches help? (You can remove the Cache:Pull and Cache:Push steps temporarily to not to use the cache, or you can delete all the caches on the Settings tab of the app. : NO
• Does the issue happen sporadically, or every time? : Every Time
• Does upgrading the build Step to the latest version help? : No
• When did the issue start? : Setting up my environment for the first time

Local reproduction

Tough to reproduce locally because I can’t branch off in parallel and clone the environment.

Build log

I can provide the log on request. I have followed the steps in the tutorial above as closely as possible.

[koral]

Bitrise Start Build starts build on clean VM.

clone the build it is running in

means that the trigger of the started build has the same parameters as the original build.

No changes made in original build are passed to child workflow (except for environment variables you specified explicitly in the step input).

You can only extract set of steps common for all your workflows to utility workflow and include it in other workflows.
https://devcenter.bitrise.io/bitrise-cli/workflows/#utility-workflows

[bitce]

@koral is absolutely right, the VMs aren’t actually cloned. We do fin that this line is a bit confusing so we’re currently in the midst of re-writing that sentence!