Overview

You can run a CircleCI pipeline manually in several ways:

From the CircleCI Web App

1. In the CircleCI web app, select your organization
2. Select your project from your org homepage or from the Projects list in the sidebar
3. On your project's pipelines page, click the "Trigger Pipeline" button
4. Select your pipeline from the dropdown menu
5. Select your config source branch (where CircleCI should find your pipeline config)
6. If using GitHub App or Bitbucket Data Center, select your checkout source and branch
7. Optionally add pipeline parameters by selecting "Add +"
8. Click "Run Pipeline" to start the pipeline

Trigger a pipeline provides detailed instructions for this process.

Using the API

You can also trigger a pipeline using the CircleCI API:

curl -X POST https://circleci.com/api/v2/project/<project-slug>/pipeline/run \
  --header "Circle-Token: $CIRCLE_TOKEN" \
  --header "content-type: application/json" \
  --data '{
  "definition_id": "<pipeline-definition-id>",
  "config": {"branch": "<your-branch-name>"},
  "checkout": {"branch": "<your-branch-name>"},
  "parameters": {"<param-name>": "<param-value>"}
  }'

You'll need to replace the placeholders with your specific project details. The API method requires you to have your project slug and pipeline definition ID, which you can find in your project settings.

Trigger a pipeline provides complete API instructions.

Using the CircleCI CLI

For local development and testing, you can use the CircleCI CLI to run jobs locally:

circleci local execute --job job_name

This allows you to test your pipeline jobs without committing code or consuming platform resources, which is great for development and debugging.

Local CI pipeline development provides more details on this approach.