Resolving Duplicate Pipeline Executions on CircleCI for GitHub Repositories

Overview

Experiencing duplicate pipeline executions on CircleCI when committing to the master branch can be frustrating. This issue often arises due to synchronization problems between GitHub and CircleCI, particularly with pull request statuses. In this case, an open pull request in CircleCI's records, despite being closed on GitHub, triggered duplicate pipelines.

Prerequisites

• Access to the GitHub repository settings.
• Administrative access to CircleCI project settings.

Solution

1. Identify the Problem:

   • Check by clicking the duplicate build on default branch and see if pull requests are associated to it like the example image below. Also check that on project settings "Only build pull requests" setting is enabled, and no other branch are affected.

     

2. Verify Pull Request Status:
   • Ensure that the pull request in question is closed on GitHub. You can do this by visiting the pull request.
3. Update CircleCI Records:
   • If a pull request is incorrectly marked as open in CircleCI or associated to default branch, it may require manual intervention to update its status to "closed" in CircleCI's database. Please contact CircleCI Support for assistance with the link where you are seeing duplicate build and that PR is closed but getting associated to default branch.
4. Monitor Pipeline Executions:
   • After resolving the issue, monitor your pipeline executions to confirm that they are no longer duplicated.

Additional Resources

• Troubleshooting Duplicate Builds on CircleCI
• GitHub Webhooks Documentation