How to set a custom maximum job duration

Currently the maximum duration of a job is "hard-coded" at the organization level, and is solely based on the organization's plan.

This article explains how to leverage the step-level background attribute and the CircleCI API v2 "Cancel job" endpoint to customize a job's maximum duration.

Prerequisites

You will need to store a personal API token (it can be a personal API token generated for a machine-user) in a project-level or context-level environment variable.

Instructions

Add the following as the first step of your job:

- run:
    name: Set maximum job duration to 90 minutes
    background: true
    command: |
      sleep 90m
      curl --request POST \
      --url https://circleci.com/api/v2/project/gh/$CIRCLE_PROJECT_USERNAME/$CIRCLE_PROJECT_REPONAME/job/$CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM/cancel \
      --header "Circle-Token: $CIRCLECI_API_TOKEN"

Note: CIRCLE_PROJECT_USERNAME, CIRCLE_PROJECT_REPONAME, and CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM, are built-in environment variables, and are automatically populated for each job.