You can leverage an admin API endpoint to see recent builds on your CircleCI Server.
Prerequisites
You need to be an admin user on the Server instance.
You will need a User API token. The token can be generated from
https://app.${CIRCLE_HOSTNAME}/settings/user/tokens
Usage
You can leverage the admin API endpoint as follows:
To view the "most recent 10 builds":
curl -H "Circle-Token: $CIRCLE_TOKEN" \ "https://$CIRCLE_HOSTNAME/api/v1/admin/recent-builds?limit=10"
To view only "running" builds:
curl -H "Circle-Token: $CIRCLE_TOKEN" \ "https://$CIRCLE_HOSTNAME/api/v1/admin/recent-builds?status=running"
To fetch "queued" builds (JSON summary):
curl -sS -f -H "Circle-Token: $CIRCLE_TOKEN" \
"https://$CIRCLE_HOSTNAME/api/v1/admin/recent-builds?status=queued&limit=10" \
| jq '{total:length, oldest:(map(select(.queued_at))|min_by(.queued_at)|{build_url,queued_at}), builds:map({build_url,queued_at})}'To see how many "queued" or if you have 1000 queued builds:
curl -sS -f -H "Circle-Token: $CIRCLE_TOKEN" \
"https://$CIRCLE_HOSTNAME/api/v1/admin/recent-builds?status=queued&limit=10" \
| jq '{
total: length,
oldest: (map(select(.queued_at))
| min_by(.queued_at)
| {build_url, queued_at}),
builds: map({build_url, queued_at})
}'Considerations:
There is no enforced maximum for the
limitparameter.Using a very large limit can cause timeouts or degraded performance.
For lightweight usage (e.g., occasional
curlcalls for inspection), no special configuration is needed.For heavy or automated usage (e.g., thousands of requests per minute, such as
25,000+/min), reach out to CircleCI Support or your Account Team for guidance.In some cases, right-sizing resources may be required to ensure reliability when hitting this endpoint at scale.