DEV Community: Buildstash

[Boost]

Buildstash — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:20:15 +0000

With Bitrise slashing their retention period for artifacts again, is Buildstash the alternative?

Robbie Cargill ・ Jan 28

Moving from GitHub Actions? Software binary management for any CI/CD pipeline

Buildstash — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 01:21:19 +0000

Using self-hosted runners? Seeking alternate options to GitHub Actions for CI/CD? Buildstash is ready to manage your artifacts

Following GitHub's announcement (then postponement) of the introduction of charges for bringing self-hosted runners to their GitHub Actions CI/CD platform, some teams are exploring alternative options for CI/CD orchestration.

Buildstash is a software binary management tool, which can manage your built software artifacts targeting any platform - whether mobile or desktop apps, games, XR, tools, embedded firmware, and so on. If you're moving to a new CI/CD platform, it's easy to connect and begin better storing and organizing all your built binaries, sharing with your team and with testers, and signing off for release all within a single unified workflow.

GitLab CI/CD

GitLab's CI/CD platform has support for free self-hosted runners on all their plans. Buildstash has an integration in GitLab's CI/CD catalog which makes it easy to add to your pipeline and send in build artifacts.

Jenkins

Jenkins is a widely used, time-tested, and open source CI/CD platform which allows full self-hosting. Find the Buildstash plugin in the Jenkins Plugin Index, to upload built binaries from either Freestyle or Pipeline style workflows.

fastlane

For mobile teams using fastlane tooling for build automation, our fastlane plugin couldn't be simpler to install, and pass in the built .apk .aab. or .ipa. This allows for another easy approach in integrating Buildstash for artifact management regardless of which CI/CD orchestration tooling you may be using.

Azure DevOps Pipelines

Azure DevOps Pipelines, Microsoft's other CI/CD tool, does allow for self-hosted runners, but limits to a single runner before incurring a per-runner fee. If you're looking at moving to Pipelines, the good news is Buildstash has a ready-made integration which is simple to install to your organization and use in your pipelines to upload build artifacts.

Unity Build Automation

Game developers using Unity may look at their Build Automation platform for a simple approach to Unity-specific build workflows, and Buildstash can support simple upload of your playable builds via webhooks.. Unfortunately Unity don't allow you to bring self-hosted runners, so games teams will need to look at alternatives if this is a priority, such as GameCI - a comprehensive set of tooling for building your own Unity build pipelines with documented support for not just GitHub Actions, but also GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI.

Connect any CI/CD you want via API

Of course if you're looking at another CI/CD platform not mentioned here, we're probably working on adding support soon, and in the meantime you can use our simple API to upload builds directly.

Stick with GitHub Actions

Of course, with GitHub's announcement postponement of the self-hosted fee introduction, you may be intending to stick with the platform - which features an extensive integrations marketplace, and strong community support. Our integration is available on the GitHub marketplace for easy installation to your actions workflows.

Launching open sign up on Buildstash - the platform for managing software binaries

Buildstash — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:46:44 +0000

Today we're launching off our waitlist, and letting anyone sign up to try out Buildstash - free and without any barriers. We're so excited to take this next big step in our mission to make better software binary and release management accessible to all software teams.

Plus, we've also launched a new Docs site, with comprehensive documentation for our platform, integrations, and API.

And, all of this is just "Day 1" of our first Launch Week - we'll be launching a new feature every single day this week.

The journey here

We started working on Buildstash after noticing a recurring pattern across software teams we'd worked on - whether in mobile apps, game development, work for clients, or in embedded - there was a shared problem:

Teams would of course version code; and if they had a good workflow in place, there would likely be some sort of CI/CD pipeline to build that code.. but once they had the built binary?

Most had no effective system for managing them. Maybe dumping past builds in a shared folder, providing someone remembers. Often mislabeled, or inconsistently versioned. Chaotic SharePoint and Google Drive folders with inflexible permissions. Frequently expired WeTransfer links when sharing with a client or publisher.

And when it comes to guiding software through to release, there's a ton of different tools for issue tracking, QA, and deployment - but while they all relate to built binaries - whether testing, reviewing, or deploying - they're all disconnected from them too. Teams often end up falling back to Slack to keep track of what builds are where; what's been signed off or hasn't. And a ton of copying and pasting build numbers back and forth between tools.

We're looking to solve all of this with Buildstash.

We set out to build a platform for managing all built software binaries - of any type, wherever they're produced, and wherever they're being deployed or distributed*.

(*distinct from the limited existing tools out there for managing build artifacts - which are more narrowly focused on the problem of package repository management)

And, a complete workflow for guiding binaries through to release - integrating with the tools you already use, letting you easily attach builds - for example directly to a bug report in your issue tracking tool, and maintaining context.

Buildstash is the platform for managing, collaborating on, and distributing your software binaries.

And with our launch of open sign up today, as well as the further major feature announcements rolling out this week, we're at a point we feel confident the platform is mature enough to easily integrate in your workflow, and transform how you collaborate around your binaries.

Our aim is that one day you'll look back, and a time before dedicated binary management will seem as antiquated as a time before source control.

No more waitlist

Waitlisters, wait no more.

While we've been slowly onboarding teams over the last year, we've been focused on supporting all of the varied workflows software teams have to steer their builds through test channels to release, and building integrations with the tools they already use.

An absolute focus of ours is that wherever you make your builds, it should be extremely fast and easy to connect the source to Buildstash, and have your binaries seamlessly sent into the platform.

We've also obsessed over an improved onboarding experience - guiding you through setting up your first Workspace, connecting your build pipeline, and making use of our powerful distribution options for your binaries, build streams, and releases.

Improved docs

Along with us opening the platform up to everyone today, it was as important to also launch our improved and comprehensive documentation - covering each step in getting your workspace setup, and getting the most out of the Buildstash platform.

As well as our new integrations directory, and API reference guide - look out for announcements relating to both of these later in the week!

Join us

So if you're working on any kind of software - an app, game, embedded firmware - whatever it may be..

Whatever your current build pipeline or stack might look like.. whether solo or in a large enterprise -

Buildstash Product Update - Metadata artifacts, custom targets, RTOS platforms..

Buildstash — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 20:36:51 +0000

Buildstash is the home for your software binaries. We're excited to share a huge product update with you this week.

Let's get into it -

Metadata artifacts

Metadata artifacts can now be attached to your builds. These might include SBOM (software bill of materials) files in formats such as SPDX or CycloneDX, build logs, test reports, or any related files or artifacts from your build process you'd like to keep organised.

Metadata artifacts can be uploaded and managed via the web interface and API, and we're rolling support out to our CI/CD integrations now.

Custom targets

We already provide a number of powerful ways to organise your builds - whether by target platform, stream, labels, or supported architectures.

Sometimes when it comes to target platform you might want to get more granular, or define your own targets. For example, maybe you're in the embedded space, and have firmware specific to each of your devices. Or, the platforms you're targeting are otherwise bespoke or obscure, and you'd like built in support to group builds beyond our built-in or "Generic" platform, or falling back another approach like labels.

All these use cases are now served by the ability to create your own custom "targets" within platforms.

Support for 42 more platforms, including embedded targets

We've just added built-in support for a ton more platforms.

You can now specifically target any major Linux distribution, additional enterprise Unix distros like HP-UX or IBM AIX, and new mobile platforms including Fitbit OS, Tizen, and HarmonyOS.

In the embedded space, we've added a wide array of popular RTOS like Zephyr, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, and many more.

Workspace labels

We've improved labels - which can now also be created at the Workspace level, and used across all your applications!

Existing application labels can be easily merged into workspace labels to promote them.

Default streams

Out of the box Buildstash creates some helpful default streams in all your new apps.

Sometimes you might wish to have your own default streams for any new apps you create, rather than having to manually customise them every time. Now, it's easy to do! Set stream details, including retention policies.

Improved enterprise single sign-on

We've added support for further enterprise SSO providers. Enterprise SSO support is available to teams on the Ultra and Enterprise plans - contact us if you'd like it enabled on your workspace.

Two-factor authentication

2FA is now available on all accounts. Go to your user settings to enable it today for improved security.

Buildstash CEO and co-founder Robbie Cargill shared some thoughts on the history behind Visual Studio App Center, from its HockeyApp origins, as it closes today. Why it's a loss to many teams, and why Buildstash may be the replacement you're looking for.

Buildstash — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 22:45:21 +0000

Robbie Cargill

Mar 31 '25

As Visual Studio App Center closes, a look back, and what to use now?

#appcenter #devops #mobile #testing

Comments 1

4 min read

Why we're making Buildstash - build-to-release management for app and game devs

Buildstash — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:19:00 +0000

We are Robbie Cargill and Markus Wilson, the co-founders of Buildstash 👋👋

We met over a decade ago, at a studio making apps for clients.

At this studio we churned out a lot of apps, for a lot of different clients, for just about every platform you can imagine. Often we'd be working, to varying degrees, on 5 or so projects at a time, and in a given year our team might easily deliver more than 30 apps.

And on each of those projects, we were making a lot of builds. Whether from Unity, or Xcode, we'd make builds to test internally, to demo, to send to a client for review and sign-off, for our sales team to take to events and secure us more clients to deliver more apps, and so make still more builds.

And where did all these builds go? Well usually they'd just be dumped on a network drive somewhere, if someone remembered to do it. Or maybe a particular build sent to a client via a WeTransfer link.

And 6 months, or even 2 years later, when the team were asked for a particular build of a particular app almost faded from memory? Well inevitably no one could find it. WeTransfer links had long expired. Any project builds which had been archived, if they were, were named and organised poorly and no one was sure what was what, or where to find it.

The source project would have to be pulled down again, devs praying it still ran as expected, and rebuilt, with it only occasionally being that easy. This wasted a ton of time, and seemed blatantly a poor experience for the developers, for the client, and everyone else involved. If a client came back with an issue, it wasn't always clearly documented what build they were using, and what git commit it had been built from.

It was obvious there could be something better.

A good other chunk of our careers have been spent working at games studios. Working on games is different in many ways. It's a nice change of pace to work on one, big project at a time, for a long time. But of course, the pressures to meet deadlines and deliver work on schedule remain the same.

Game devs produce a lot of builds too! Impromptu builds a developer makes to quickly test something out on their machine, QA builds, builds for the publisher to review, nightly builds to test the project does indeed still build. On larger projects or generally where a good workflow is in place, a CI pipeline will be setup (typically using something like Jenkins) to make these builds on dedicated machines.

But where do all these builds go? Well, some are perhaps made locally then forgotten about, assuming they won't be needed later. The CI pipeline might be setup to store them somewhere... maybe on a network drive again, or maybe somewhere in the cloud like AWS S3 (with poor accessibility across the team). What builds were important, where they came from, any other organisation around them at all, is absent.

We started speaking to other developers we knew, and realised many teams worked like this.

Clearly, we could do better.

We weren't surprised it was a common problem, when we had looked for the product to solve it, we were shocked and frustrated it didn't exist.

So we had to build it.

We're making Buildstash to automate the process of archiving all of your past builds. Whether they're made locally on a team member's machine, or using CI, regardless - they'll be uploaded and available via Buildstash.

You can easily keep all those past builds organised too. Builds are sorted into streams - like nightlies, experimental, stable. Setup custom labels, and platforms, as needed.

And since all your builds are already available in Buildstash, it's then a breeze to share them with whoever you like. Whether setting up a quick, secure, share link; with your team members in a shared workspace; or even publicly on your website.

This is why we set out to make Buildstash, but it's just the beginning.

We realised there's an entire chunk of many developers workflows which aren't well supported by present tools - the build-to-release phases. There's countless tools to assist with developing your apps, and version control for storing the code, and CI to help with building it. But once it's built...

We passionately believe that if we get Buildstash right, it'll transform many developers workflows from building their apps, through to publishing them. It'll one day seem as crazy to think there was a time you worked without a build-to-release manager, as it would be to work without version control.

We hope you'll join us on this journey by signing up for our waitlist!

Buildstash joins Techstars NYC

Buildstash — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 21:04:18 +0000

We're thrilled to announce we're joining the Techstars NYC program for Fall 2024. Techstars' backing marks a significant step forward in our mission to transform developers build-to-release workflows.

Buildstash seeks to fix a problem frequently encountered by the more than 3 million developers working on apps or games globally, who build their projects from code into the packages their users can run, but often lack a system of archiving and organising these builds. With powerful tools to automate storing builds as they're made, for sharing with collaborators, and preparing for deployment, Buildstash saves devs time and stress.

We arrived in New York last week and we're so excited to join other inspiring founders, and use Techstars as a springboard to bring transformed build to release management to more developers, faster!

Read the press release here.

Read Techstars announcement.

We're working on better build artifact management for app and game devs, and need your input

Buildstash — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:40:06 +0000

We're working on Buildstash because we were frustrated it didn't exist. It was clear to us that current build artifact management tools weren't catering to app and game devs.

As the co-founders, we've worked in studios ranging from client work, SaaS, mobile app dev, XR, and games, and not a single team we've worked with had an effective strategy for archiving and managing past builds. We've seen shared drive dumping grounds, confusion over what build is what, constantly expiring WeTransfer links, frustrated clients, lost key builds, over-complicated deployment, and plenty developer time wasted.

We're just getting started on this journey.

We're really excited with what we're building. And we want to make sure we're building what others need, not just what we've observed ourselves.

If you're an app (mobile/desktop) or game developer, we'd massively appreciate it if you were up for sharing your own frustrations with how you or your team manage build artifacts at the moment, and how you get them out to users or collaborators! Give us your thoughts via this link.

And if you're just up for finding out more about the project, and following what we're working on, aside from sharing occasional updates here, you can find us at Buildstash.com.