CD.json reference

A CD.json file can be placed anywhere in your repository (max size 256 kB). It describes one pipeline, or a list of pipelines, made of ordered stages that run sequentially. See CI vs CD for how this differs from CI.json, and how CI/CD jobs are triggered for when it fires.

Top-level shape

A single pipeline:

{ "Name": "...", "On": ["submit"], "Stages": [ ... ] }

Or a list of pipelines:

[
    { "Name": "pipeline-one", "On": ["submit"], "Stages": [ ... ] },
    { "Name": "pipeline-two", "On": ["manual"], "Stages": [ ... ] }
]

Job fields

Field	Type	Required	Notes
Name	string	yes
On	array of strings	yes	only "submit" and/or "manual" (never "push"), max 10 entries
Stages	array of stages	yes	at least 1, max 100

Stage fields

Field	Type	Required	Notes
CanAutoStart	boolean	yes	see Sequential execution & manual approval gates
Name	string	yes
ImageName	string	no	same values as CI, see Images
Steps	array of steps	yes	same schema as CI steps, see Step fields, max 100
TimeoutMilliSeconds / TimeoutSeconds / TimeoutMinutes	number	yes	set exactly one of these three

Sequential execution & manual approval gates

Stages always run in the order they're declared — a stage only starts once the previous one has finished successfully.

• "CanAutoStart": true — the stage starts automatically as soon as the previous stage finishes.
• "CanAutoStart": false — the pipeline pauses after the previous stage finishes, and waits for a human to explicitly resume it before this stage runs.

This is what makes CD.json suitable for deployments: for example, an automatic build-and-test stage followed by a manually-gated production deploy stage.

Full example

A pipeline with an automatic first stage and a manually-gated second stage:

{
    "Name": "sleep",
    "On": ["submit", "manual"],
    "Stages": [
        { "CanAutoStart": true,  "Name": "auto sleep for 30s", "Steps": [{"Run": "sleep 30"}], "TimeoutMinutes": 5 },
        { "CanAutoStart": false, "Name": "sleep for 30s after manual ok", "Steps": [{"Run": "sleep 30"}], "TimeoutMinutes": 5 }
    ]
}

A pipeline that only ever runs when manually started:

{
    "Name": "go-test",
    "On": ["manual"],
    "Stages": [
        {
            "CanAutoStart": false,
            "Name": "get code and test",
            "ImageName": "go",
            "Steps": [
                { "TemplateName": "get-code" },
                { "Run": "go test ./..." }
            ],
            "TimeoutMinutes": 30
        }
    ]
}

Validation limits

Limit	Value
CD.json file size	256 kB
Stages per pipeline	1–100
Steps per stage	100
On entries per pipeline	10
Jobs created per commit (CI + CD combined)	100

A stage occupies the same parallel-job slot as a CI job — see Parallelism & concurrency.