Last Successful Prebuild

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Similar to incremental prebuilds, last successful prebuild leverages older prebuilds in order to create new workspaces faster.

When enabled, new workspaces may start based on a prebuild that was built for an older commit, in order to reuse any existing build artifacts. This is achieved by:

1. Loading the older prebuild
2. Updating the source code to the latest commit
3. Running any before, prebuild, and init tasks again interactively (incremental rebuild)
   Note: This means that your init tasks will be run twice on the same checkout, i.e. they need to be reentrant

Thus, your new workspace will both:

• load quickly: no waiting, even if a newer prebuild is still being computed (i.e. you’ll never see the “Prebuild in Progress” screen again ⏩)
• and it will be ready quickly: your IDE Terminal will run either no build at all (if none is needed), or just a quick incremental rebuild (faster than a full build ♻️)

Skip Prebuilds

When Gitpod can leverage older prebuilds to start your workspaces faster, you no longer necessarily need to create a new prebuild for every commit that is pushed to your repository.

This is where the ability to skip prebuilds becomes helpful: For example, you could decide to only trigger a new prebuild every 5 commits, or every 10 commits.

The ideal number depends on your project. For example:

• If you push new commits to your repository very frequently, you may want a higher number (especially if your prebuilds also take a long time to build)
• On the other hand, if your prebuilds finish quickly, and you typically don’t push new commits very often, it may be fine to not skip any prebuild (i.e. skip prebuilds = 0)

Please feel free to adjust and experiment with this value.