CircleCI and Semaphore on BuildPulse runners

BuildPulse runs CircleCI and Semaphore jobs on the same machines, sizes and per-minute prices as our GitHub Actions runners. You create a runner on your CI's side, paste its token into BuildPulse, and change one line in your pipeline.

How it works

BuildPulse watches your CircleCI resource class or Semaphore agent type for waiting jobs. When one is queued, we start an Ubuntu 24.04 machine with Docker at the size you picked. It registers with your CI, runs exactly one job, and is discarded afterwards.

CircleCI setup

BuildPulse machines join CircleCI as a self-hosted machine runner. Jobs use the machine executor with your resource class.

1. In CircleCI, open Self-Hosted Runners, create a namespace if your organization has none, then create a resource class, for example your-namespace/bp-x64-4x. Copy the resource class token CircleCI shows once.
2. In CircleCI User Settings → Personal API Tokens, create a token with read-only access. BuildPulse uses it only to see when jobs are waiting for your resource class. Read-only tokens expire after at most a year; we alert you when it stops working.
3. In BuildPulse, open Runners → Setup, pick CircleCI and a size. Paste the resource class, its token and the API token. We check them against CircleCI before saving, and store them encrypted in AWS Secrets Manager.
4. Point a job at the resource class:

version: 2.1
jobs:
  test:
    machine: true
    resource_class: your-namespace/bp-x64-4x
    steps:
      - checkout
      - run: npm ci && npm test

Docker is available to every step, so docker build and docker run work as they do on a CircleCI machine. CircleCI caps how many self-hosted runner jobs run at once: 5 on its Free plan, 20 on Performance, unlimited on Scale (circleci.com/pricing).

Semaphore setup

BuildPulse machines join Semaphore as a self-hosted agent of an agent type you create.

1. In Semaphore, open Settings → Self-hosted agents and add an agent type, for example s1-bp-x64-4x. Copy its registration token.
2. In BuildPulse, open Runners → Setup, pick Semaphore CI and a size. Enter your organization (your-org or your-org.semaphoreci.com), the agent type and the registration token. We check them against Semaphore before saving.
3. Point your pipeline at the agent type:

version: v1.0
name: CI
agent:
  machine:
    type: s1-bp-x64-4x
blocks:
  - name: Test
    task:
      jobs:
        - name: npm test
          commands:
            - checkout
            - npm ci && npm test

checkout, cache, artifact and test-results work as usual. sem-version is not available on any Semaphore self-hosted agent, ours included: install language versions in a command or run the job in a container image.

More

BuildPulse vs CircleCI machines walks through the trade-offs in more detail. Questions about a setup? Get in touch.