On failure

Configure what Harness does when a stage or step fails — abort, retry, ignore, or mark as success.

The On failure setting defines how Harness responds when a stage or step fails. By default, a failure aborts the rest of the pipeline. You can override this individually on any stage or step.

What you will learn

• The available failure actions: abort, retry, ignore, mark as success, manual intervention, and rollback

• How to target specific error types (timeout, connectivity, authorization) with individual failure rules

• How to configure retry with backoff and escalate to manual intervention after retries are exhausted

• How ignored failures affect the pipeline's final status

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Actions

YAML value	What happens
fail	Mark the stage as failed and stop the pipeline. This is the default.
abort	Abort the pipeline immediately.
ignore	Mark the stage as failed but continue running the next stage.
success	Treat the failure as a success and continue the pipeline.
retry	Re-run the stage up to a configured number of times before giving up.
manual-intervention	Pause execution and wait for a user to take action. Harness displays a popup with options: Mark as Success, Ignore, Retry, Abort, or Rollback Stage. If no action is taken before the timeout expires, the timeout-action runs.
stage-rollback	Trigger the stage's rollback steps.
pipeline-rollback	Trigger rollback across all stages in the pipeline.

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Error types

A failure strategy can target specific error types rather than applying to all failures:

Error type	Triggers on
all	Any failure
timeout	Stage exceeds its timeout duration
input-timeout	Input waiting for user response times out
authentication	Authentication errors
authorization	Authorization/permission errors
connectivity	Network or connectivity errors
verification	Verification step failures
approval-rejection	An approval step is rejected
policy-evaluation	Policy evaluation failure
delegate-provisioning	Delegate could not be provisioned
delegate-restart	Delegate restarted during execution
user-mark-fail	Stage was manually marked as failed
unknown	Unclassified errors

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YAML

on-failure is a list of rules. Each rule specifies one or more error types and the action to take:

stages:
  - name: deploy
    id: deploy
    on-failure:
      - errors:
          - all
        action: fail
    steps:
      - name: run
        id: run
        run:
          script: ./deploy.sh

Retry with backoff

When action is retry, configure the number of attempts, the interval between them, and what to do if all attempts are exhausted:

on-failure:
  - errors:
      - all
    action:
      retry:
        attempts: 3
        interval: 30s
        failure-action: fail

Retry, then pause for manual intervention

If you want a human to decide after retries are exhausted, use manual-intervention as the failure-action. The pipeline waits up to timeout for input. If no one responds, timeout-action runs instead:

on-failure:
  - errors:
      - all
    action:
      retry:
        attempts: 2
        interval: 15m
        failure-action:
          manual-intervention:
            timeout: 20m
            timeout-action: fail

Valid timeout-action values: fail, ignore, abort, success, stage-rollback, pipeline-rollback.

Multiple rules

Different actions for different error types; rules are evaluated in order:

on-failure:
  - errors:
      - timeout
    action: retry
  - errors:
      - all
    action: fail

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Pipeline status with ignored failures

When action: ignore is used and a stage fails, the pipeline status shows as IgnoreFailed, not Success. The pipeline completes and all subsequent stages run, but the final status reflects that at least one stage was ignored.

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Next steps

• Go to Conditional execution to skip a stage based on an expression.

• Go to Timeout to set the maximum run time for a stage.

• Go to Pipelines overview to review the pipeline model.