Over the years CI tools have gone from specialist to generalist. Jenkins was originally very good at building Java projects and not much else, Travis had explicit steps for Rails projects, CircleCI was similarly like this back in the day.
This was a dead end. CI is not special. We realised as a community that in fact CI jobs were varied, that encoding knowledge of the web framework or even language into the CI system was a bad idea, and CI systems became _general workflow orchestrators_, with some logging and pass/fail UI slapped on top. This was a good thing!
I orchestrated a move off CircleCI 2 to GitHub Actions, precisely because CircleCI botched the migration from the specialist to generalist model, and we were unable to express a performant and correct CI system in their model at the time. We could express it with GHA.
GHA is not without its faults by any stretch, but... the log browser? So what, just download the file, at least the CI works. The YAML? So it's not-quite-yaml, they weren't the first or last to put additional semantics on a config format, all CI systems have idiosyncrasies. Plugins being Docker images? Maybe heavyweight, but honestly this isn't a bad UX.
What does matter? Owning your compute? Yeah! This is an important one, but you can do that on all the major CI systems, it's not a differentiator. Dynamic pipelines? That's really neat, and a good reason to pick Buildkite.
My takeaway from my experience with these platforms is that Actions is _pretty good_ in the ways that truly matter, and not a problem in most other ways. If I were starting a company I'd probably choose Buildkite, sure, but for my open source projects, Actions is good.
In game development we care a lot about build systems- and annoyingly, we have vanishingly few companies coming to throw money at our problems.
The few that do, charge a kings ransom (Incredibuild). Our build times are pretty long, and minimising them is ideal.
If, then, your build system does not understand your build-graph then you’re waiting even longer for builds or you’re keeping around incremental state and dirty workspaces (which introduces transient bugs, as now the compiler has to do the hard job of incrementally building anyway).
So our build systems need to be acutely aware of the intricacies of how the game is built (leading to things like UnrealEngine Horde and UBA).
If we used a “general purpose” approach we’d be waiting in some cases over a day for a build, even with crazy good hardware.
Game dev has a serious case of NIH - sometimes for good reasons but in lots of cases it’s because things have been set up in a way that makes changing that impractical. Using UBA as an example - FastBuild, Incredibuild, SNDBS Sccache all exist as either caching or distribution systems. Compiling a game engine isn’t much different to compiling a web browser (which ninja was written for).
I’ve worked at two game studios where we’ve used general purpose CI systems and been able to push out builds in < 15 minutes. Horde and UBA exist to handle how epic are doing things internally, rather than as an inherent requirement on how to use the tools effectively. If you don’t have the same constraints as developing Unreal Engine (and Fortnite) then you don’t have the same needs.
(I worked for epic when horde came online, but don’t any more).
WRT github actions... I agree with OOP, they leave much to be desired, esp when working on high-velocity work. My ci/cd runs locally first and then GHA is (slower) verification, low-noise, step.
The systems I like to design that use GHA usually only use the good parts. GitHub is a fine events dispatcher, for instance, but a very bad workflow orchestrator. So delegate that to a system that is good at that instead
They answer your "so what" quite directly:
>> Build logs look like terminal output, because they are terminal output. ANSI colors work. Your test framework’s fancy formatting comes through intact. You’re not squinting at a web UI that has eaten your escape codes and rendered them as mojibake. This sounds minor. It is not minor. You are reading build logs dozens of times a day. The experience of reading them matters in the way that a comfortable chair matters. You only notice how much it matters after you’ve been sitting in a bad one for six hours and your back has filed a formal complaint.
Having to look mentally ignore ANSI escape codes in raw logs (let alone being unable to unable to search for text through them) is annoying as hell, to put it mildly.
You have a tool here, which is noted elsewhere: it's "less --raw". Also there's another tool which analyzes your logs and color codes them: "lnav".
lnav is incredibly powerful and helps understanding what's happening, when, where. It can also tail logs. Recommended usage is "your_command 2>&1 | lnav -t".
Except for GitHub charging you monthly to run your own CI jobs on your own hardware.
I start with a Makefile. The Makefile drives everything. Docker (compose), CI build steps, linting, and more. Sometimes a project outgrows it; other times it does not.
But it starts with one unitary tool for triggering work.
I use Fastlane extensively on mobile, as it reduces boilerplate and gives enough structure that the inherent risk of depending on a 3rd-party is worth it. If all else fails, it's just Ruby, so can break out of it.
What you're saying is essentially ”Just Write Bash Scripts”, but with an extra layer of insanity on top. I hate it when I encounter a project like this.
I had this fight for some years in my present work and was really nagging in the beginning about the path we were getting into by not allowing the developers to run the full (or most) of the pipeline in their local machines… the project decided otherwise and now we spend a lot of time and resources with a behemoth of a CI infrastructure because each MR takes about 10 builds (of trial and error) in the pipeline to be properly tested.
Yes, there will always be special exemptions: they suck, and we suffer as developers because we cannot replicate a prod-like environment in our local dev environment.
But I laugh when I join teams and they say that "our CI servers" can run it but our shitty laptops cannot, and I wonder why they can't just... spend more money on dev machines? Or perhaps spend some engineering effort so they work on both?
If your CI invocations are anything more than running a script or a target on a build tool (make, etc.) where the real build/test steps exist and can be run locally on a dev workstation, you're making the CI system much more complex than it needs to be.
CI jobs should at most provide an environment and configuration (credentials, endpoints, etc.), as a dev would do locally.
This also makes your code CI agnostic - going between systems is fairly trivial as they contain minimal logic, just command invocations.
It's correct to design CI pipelines in order to offload much of the logic to subsystems, but pipelines will eventually grow in complexity and the CI config system should be designed in order not to get in the way. I don't know buildkite, but Gitlab CI is the best I know. Template and job composition works brilliantly, top-level object being the job and not the stage result in flat, easier to read config files and the packed features are really good, but it's hard to debug, the conditional logic sometimes fails in unexpected ways, it's exhausting to use the predefined variables reference and the permission system for multi project pipelines is abysmal.
I'd argue that this also dovetails very nicely with having common, shared invocations - if you can run "make test" in any repo and have it work, that makes CI code reuse even easier.
As for the complexity comments, that complexity has to go somewhere, and you should look for how to best factor the system so it's debuggable. Sometimes this may mean restructuring how your code is factored or deployed or has failure tolerance so it's easier to test, and this should be thought of as an architecture task early on.
These tool fails are as a consequence of a failure of proper policy.
Tooling and Methodology!
Here’s the thing: build it first, then optimize it. Same goes for compile/release versus compile/debug/test/hack/compile/debug/test/test/code cycles.
That there is not a big enough distinction between a development build and a release build is a policy mistake, not a tooling ‘issue’.
Set things up properly and anyone pushing through git into the tooling pipeline are going to get their fingers bent soon enough, anyway, to learn how the machine mangles digits.
You can adopt this policy of environment isolation with any tool - it’s a method.
Tooling and Methodology!
In the past week I have seen:
- actions/checkout inexplicably failing, sometimes succeeding on 3rd retry (of the built-in retry logic)
- release ci jobs scheduling _twice_, causing failures, because ofc the release already exists
- jobs just not scheduling. Sometimes for 40m.
I have been using it actively for a few years and putting aside everything the author is saying, just the base reliability is going downhill.
I guess zig was right. Too bad they missed builtkite, Codeberg hasn't been that reliable or fast in my experience.
All of that on top of a rock-solid system for bringing your own runner pools which lets you use totally different machine types and configurations for each type of CI job.
Highly, highly recommend.
But yes, Groovy is a much better language for defining pipelines than YAML. Honestly pretty much any programming language at all is better than YAML. YAML is fine for config files, but not for something as complex as defining a CI pipeline.
imo top 10 best admin/devs free software written in past 25 years.
Jenkins is probably a bit like Java, technically it is fine. The problem is really where/who typically uses it and as there is so much freedom it is really easy to make a monster. Where as for Go it is a lot harder to write terrible unmaintainable code compared to Java.
My pet peeve with Github Actions was that if I want to do simple things like make a "release", I have to Google for and install packages from internet randos. Yes, it is possible this rando1234 is a founding github employee and it is all safe. But why does something so basic need external JS? packages?
- Ubuntu useradd command causes 30s+ hang [1]
- Ubuntu: sudo -u some-user unexpectedly ends up with environment variables for the runner [2]
They told you why it takes so long no? the runners come by default with loads of programming languages installed like Rust, Haskell, Node, Python, .Net etc so it sets all that up per user add.
I would also question why your adding users on an ephemeral runner.
We use runners for things that aren't quite "CI for software source code" that does some "weird" stuff.
For instance, we require that new developer system setup be automated - so we have a set of scripts to do that, and a CI runner that runs on those scripts.
> But if you’re running a real production system, if you have a monorepo, if your builds take more than five minutes, if you care about supply chain security, if you want to actually own your CI: look at Buildkite.
Goes in line with exactly what I said in 2020 [0] about GitHub vs Self-hosting. Not a big deal for individuals, but for large businesses it's a problem if you can push that critical change when your CI is down every week.
I get it's quirky, but I'm at a low energy state and just wanted to know what it does...
Right before I churned out, I happened to click "[E] Exit to classic Buildkite" and get sent to their original homepage: https://buildkite.com/platform/
It just tells you what it Buildkite does! Sure it looks default B2B SaaS, but more importantly it's clear. "The fastest CI platform" instead of some LinkedIn-slop manifesto.
If I want to know why it's fast, I scroll down and learn it scales to lots of build agents and has unlimited parallelism!
And if I wonder if it plays nice with my stack, I scroll and there's logos for a bunch of well known testing frameworks!
And if I want to know if this isn't v0.0001 pre-alpha software by a pre-seed company spending runway on science-fair home pages, this one has social proof that isn't buried in a pseudo-intellectual rant!
-
I went down the rabbit hole of what lead to this and it's... interesting to say the least.
https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/nothing-works-until-you-m...
https://www.reddit.com/r/branding/comments/1pi6b8g/nothing_w...
https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1petsis/comment/nsm...
Glad that the classic site hit the mark, but a lot work to do to make that clearer than it is; we're working on the next iteration that will sunset the CLI homepage into an easter egg.
Happy to take more critique, either on the execution or the rabbit hole.
Microsoft being microsoft I guess. Making computing progressively less and less delightful because your boss sees their buggy crap is right there so why don't you use it
That aside, GH Actions doesn’t seem any worse than GitLab. I forget why I stopped using CircleCI. Price maybe? I do remember liking the feature where you could enter the console of the CI job and run commands. That was awesome.
I agree though that yaml is not ideal.
1: https://circleci.com/docs/guides/execution-managed/ssh-acces...
(Disclaimer: i work at CircleCI)
- Intermediate tasks are cached in a docker-like manner (content-addressed by filesystem and environment). Tasks in a CI pipeline build on previous ones by applying the filesystem of dependent tasks (AFAIU via overlayfs), so you don't execute the same task twice. The most prominent example of this is a feature branch that is up-to-date with main passes CI on main as soon as it's merged, as every task on main is a cache-hit with the CI execution on the feature branch.
- Failures: the UI surfaces failures to the top, and because of the caching semantics, you can re-run just the failed tasks without having to re-run their dependencies.
- Debugging: they expose a breakpoint (https://www.rwx.com/docs/rwx/remote-debugging) command that stops execution during a task and allows you to shell into the remote container for debugging, so you can debug interactively rather than pushing `env` and other debugging tasks again and again. And when you do need to push to test a fix, the caching semantics again mean you skip all the setup.
There's a whole lot of other stuff. You can generate tasks to execute in a CI pipeline via any programming language of your choice, the concurrency control supports multiple modes, no need for `actions/cache` because of the caching semantics and the incremental caching feature (https://www.rwx.com/docs/rwx/tool-caches).
And I've never had a problem with the logs.
Back in... I don't know, 2010, we used Jenkins. Yes, that Java thingy. It was kind of terrible (like every CI), but it had a "Warnings Plugin". It parsed the log output with regular expressions and presented new warnings and errors in a nice table. You could click on them and it would jump to the source. You could configure your own regular expressions (yes, then you have two problems, I know, but it still worked).
Then I had to switch to GitLab CI. Everyone was gushing how great GitLab CI was compared to Jenkins. I tried to find out: how do I extract warnings and errors from the log - no chance. To this day, I cannot understand how everyone just settled on "Yeah, we just open thousands of lines of log output and scroll until we see the error". Like an animal. So of course, I did what anyone would do: write a little script that parses the logs and generates an HTML artifact. It's still not as good as the Warnings Plugin from Jenkins, but hey, it's something...
I'm sure, eventually someone/AI will figure this out again and everyone will gush how great that new thing is that actually parses the logs and lets you jump directly to the source...
Don't get me wrong: Jenkins was and probably still is horrible. I don't want to go back. However, it had some pretty good features I still miss to this day.
My browser can handle tens of thousands of lines of logs, and has Ctrl-F that's useful for 99% of the searches I need. A better runner could just dump the logs and let the user take care of them.
Why most web development devolved into a React-like "you can't search for what you can't see" is a mystery.
If I cannot fully self host an open source project, it is not a contender for my next ci system
I haven't used as many CI systems as the author, but I've used, GH actions, Gitlab CI, CodeBuild, and spent a lot of time with Jenkins.
I've only touched Buildkite briefly 6 years ago, at the time it seemed a little underwhelming.
The CI system I enjoyed the most was TeamCity, sadly I've only used it at one job for about a year, but it felt like something built by a competent team.
I'm curious what people who have used it over a longer time period think of it.
I feel like it should be more popular.
But I don’t know about competent people, reading their release notes always got me thinking ”how can anyone write code where these bugs are even possible?”. But I guess that’s why many companies just write nonsense release notes today, to hide their incompetence ;)
Why do you consider TeamCity legacy? The latest release was just 2 months ago: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/teamcity/what-s-new-in-teamci...
>To make TeamCity more approachable for everyone, we’ve launched the pipelines initiative, and are investing heavily in reimagining the familiar UX. Complementing these efforts, we are excited to introduce the TeamCity AI Assistant.
Looks like it's under active development.
All of my customers are on bitbucket.
One of them does not even use a CI. We run tests locally and we deploy from a self hosted TeamCity instance. It's a Django app with server side HTML generation so the deploy is copying files to the server and a restart. We implemented a Capistrano alike system in bash and it's been working since before Covid. No problems.
The other one uses bitbucket pipelines to run tests after git pushes on the branches for preproduction and production and to deploy to those systems. They use Capistrano because it's a Rails app (with a Vue frontend.) For some reason the integration tests don't run reliably neither on the CI instances nor on Macs, so we run them only on my Linux laptop. It's been in production since 2021.
A customer I'm not working with anymore did use Travis and another one I don't remember. That also run a build on there because they were using Elixir with Phoenix, so we were creating a release and deploying it. No mere file copying. That was the most unpleasant deploy system of the bunch. A lot of wasted time from a push to a deploy.
In all of those cases logs are inevitably long but they don't crash the browser.
* Workflows are only registered once pushed to main, impossible to test the first runs in a branch.
* MS/GH don't care much about GHES as they do github.com, I think they'd like to see it just die. Massive lack of feature parity.
* Labels: If any of your workflows trigger from a label, they ALL DO. You can't target labels only to certain workflows, they all run and then cancel, polluting your checks.
* Deployments: What is a deployment even doing? There is no management to deploy.
* Statefulness: No native way to store state between runs in the same workflow or PR, you would think you could save some sort of state somewhere but you have to manage it all yourself with manifests or something else.
I can go on
I think the main point is that you can configure environments to target from deployments.
You might face that many times using Gitlab CI. Random things don’t work the way you think it should and the worst part is you must learn their stupid custom DSL.
Not only that, there’s no way to debug the maze of CI pipelines but I imagine it’s a hard thing to achieve. How would I be able to locally run CI that also interacts with other projects CI like calling downstream pipelines?
What's the accepted way to copy these into your own repo so you can make sure attackers won't update the script to leak my private repo and steal my `GITHUB_TOKEN`?
One thing people will say is to pin the commit SHA, so don't do "uses: randomAuthor/some-normal-action@v1", instead do "uses: randomAuthor/some-normal-action@e20fd1d81c3f403df57f5f06e2aa9653a6a60763". Alternatively, just fork the action into your own GitHub account and import that instead.
However, neither of these "solutions" work, because they do not pin the transitive dependencies.
Suppose I pin the action at a SHA or fork it, but that action still imports "tj-actions/changed-files". In that case, you would have still been pwned in the "tj-actions/changed-files" incident [2].
The only way to be sure is to manually traverse the dependency hierarchy, forking each action as you go down the "tree" and updating every action to only depend on code you control.
In other package managers, this is solved with a lockfile - go.sum, yarn.lock, ...
[1] https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-package-manager...
[2] https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/github-actions-supply-ch...
Once it was updated to latest and all the bad old manually created jobs were removed it was decent.
There are numerous ways to shoot yourself in the foot, though, and everything must be configured properly to get to feature parity with GHA (mail server, plugins, credentials, sso, https, port forwarding, webhooks, GitHub app, ...).
But once those are out of the way, its the most flexible and fastest CI system I have ever used.
He's not wrong. Buildjet just announced they were shutting down though, citing recent improvements to the GitHub Actions platform.
For the record I maintain the Runs-on [1] he's talking about, as a solo developer.
I've never used nix or nixos but a quick search led me to nixops, and then realized v4 is entirely being rewritten in rust.
I'm surprised they chose rust for glue code, and not a more dynamic and expressive language that could make things less rigid and easier to amend.
In the clojure world BigConfig [0], which I never used, would be my next stop in the build/integrate/deploy story, regardless of tech stack. It integrates workflow and templating with the full power of a dynamic language to compose various setups, from dot/yaml/tf/etc files to ops control planes (see their blog).
Currently evaluating using moonrepo.dev to attempt to efficiently build our code. What I've noticed is (aside from Bazel) it seems a lot of monorepo tools only support a subset of languages nicely. So it's hard to evaluate fairly as language support limits one's options. I found https://monorepo.tools to be helpful in learning about a lot of projects I didn't know about.
Still, I wonder who is still looking manually at CI build logs. You can use an agent to look for you, and immediately let it come up with a fix.
The actual problem is using a bunch of unportable vendor YAML for literally anything.
Define your entire build + artifact publishing pipeline in something like Bazel, Nix, etc and completely decouple everything from the runner. This allows running it locally and also switching runners extremely easily if one of them is no longer to your liking.
Don't fall prey to the vendor YAML trap.
We're running GitHub Actions. It's good. All the real logic is in Nix, and we mostly use our own runners. The rest of the UI that GitHub Actions provides is very nice.
We previously used a CI vendor which specialised in building Nix projects. We wanted to like it, but it was really clunky. GitHub Actions was a significant quality of life improvement for us.
None of my colleagues have died. GitHub Actions is not killing my engineering team at any rate.
It's fantastic for simple jobs, I use it for my hobbyist projects because I just need 20 to 30 lines to build and deploy a web build.
Just because a bike isn't good for traveling in freezing weather doesn't mean no one should own a bike.
Pick the right tool for the job.
Plus CI/CD is the boring part. I always imagined GH Actions as a quick and somewhat sloppy solution for hobbyist projects.
Not for anything serious.
I have one job that runs a shell script that runs tests, a second one that builds and pushes the docker image, and a third one that triggers CD.
Could it be faster? Yes. Could the log viewer be better? Yes. Could the configuration file format be better? Yes. Could the credentials work better? Yes.
However they're well integrated with GitHub (including GHCR), work well and are affordable.
But also, CI should be the last line of defense, not the first line.
If your system is not byzantine, you should be able to run almost all your tests locally and not need to boot a cloud machine that has to be setup from scratch and deal with all the overhead in your core loop.
Having a build system that knows what tests need to be run helps here since you're no longer just throwing compute at the problem.
> Every CI system eventually becomes “a bunch of YAML.” I’ve been through the five stages of grief about it and emerged on the other side, diminished but functional.
> I understand the appeal. I have felt it myself, late at night, after the fourth failed workflow run in a row. The desire to burn down the YAML temple and return to the simple honest earth of #!/bin/bash and set -euo pipefail. To cast off the chains of marketplace actions and reusable workflows and just write the damn commands. It feels like liberation. It is not.
Ah yes, misery loves company! There's nothing like a good rant (preferably about a technology you have to use too, although you hate its guts) to brighten up your Friday...
Very helpful for a monster repo with giant task graph
webhooks to an external system was such a better way to do it, and somehow we got away from that, because they don't want us to leave.
webhooks are to podcasts as github actions are to the things that spotify calls podcasts.
We're running a self-hosted GitLab -> hosted GitHub migration at my company (which to me feels a downgrade), and without LLMs I would have spent weeks just researching syntax for how to implement the requirements I had.
I asked Claude to simply "translate these GL templates to GH actions, I want 1 flow for this, 1 flow for that, etc" and it mostly worked. Then in the repos I link the template and ask Claude to write the workflow that uses the template with the correct inputs. I think I saved maybe 3 months worth of coding and debugging workflows. Besides maybe picking slightly outdated actions (e.g. action@v4 instead of action@v6), 95% of the work was ok, and I had to tweak a couple things afterwards.
> managed to throw AI efficiently
> and it mostly worked.
Looks like you're mostly doing your job, not quite there, but mostly
I (tend to) complain about actions because I use them.
Open to someone telling me there is a perfect solution out there. But today my actions fixes were not actions related. Just maintenance.
It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that Microsoft was one of the little gadflies that buzzed around annoying the Big Guys.
#git --clone [URL]
Our scenario: relatively simple monorepo, lots of docker, just enough bash, trunk-based dev strategy. It's great for that.
For what boils down to a personal take, light on technicalities, this reads like uncannily impersonal, prolonged attempt at dramatic writing.
If you believe the dates in this blog, it's totally different in tone, style, and wording to a safely distant 2021 post (https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2021-10-04-garbage-in-ne...).
It made me feel paranoid just in about three paragraphs. I apologize to the author if I'm wrong but we all understand what my gut tells me.
Commit with one character YAML difference? Check.
Commit with 2-3 YAML lines just to add the right logging? Check.
Wait 5+ minutes for a YAML diff to propagate through our test pipeline for the nth time today? .. sigh .. check
BUT, after ironing all these things out (and running our own beefy self-hosted runner which is triggered to wake up when there's a test process to snack on), it's .. uh.. not so bad? For now?
And fixing the pyro-radio bug will bring other issues, for sure, so they won't because some's workflow will rely on the fact that turning on the radio sets the car on fire: https://xkcd.com/1172/
nit: no, it was made by a group of engineers that loved git and wanted to make a distributed remote git repository. But it was acquired/bought out then subsequently enshittified by the richest/worst company on earth.
Otherwise the rest of this piece vibes with me.
Well, THIS blog post page reliably eats the CPU on scrolling, and the scrolling is very jerky, despite it has only text and no other visible elements.
It used to be fast ish!
Now it's full ugh.
However, there are very real things LLMs can do that greatly reduce the pain here. Understanding 800 lines of bash is simply not the boogie man it used to be a few years ago. It completely fits in context. LLMs are excellent at bash. With a bit of critical thinking when it hits a wall, LLM agents are even great at GitHub actions.
The scariest thing about this article is the number of things it's right about. Yet my uncharacteristic response to that is one big shrug, because frankly I'm not afraid of it anymore. This stuff has never been hard, or maybe it has. Maybe it still is for people/companies who have super complex needs. I guess we're not them. LLMs are not solving my most complex problems, but they're killing the pain of glue left and right.
Linux powers the world in this area and bash is the glue which executes all these commands on servers.
Any program or language you write to try and 'revolutionise CI' and be this glue will ultimately make the child process call to a bash/sh terminal anyhow and you need to read both stdout and stderr and exit codes to figure out next steps.
Or you can just use bash.
Why? We've spent years upon years upon years of building systems that enshittify processes. We've spent years losing talent in the industry and the trends aren't going to reverse. We are our own worst enemy, and are directly responsible for the state of the industry, and to an extent, the world.
To not call out bullshit where one sees it, is violence.
CI gives you areas for your bash scripts to run in self-contained small runs, that may trigger other runs, in a repeatable fashion on a clean environment, on a GUI anybody in your team can see. It gives you quick integrations into things.
CD lets you repeatedly deploy - without forgeting a step that was only known to Phil, the guy that retired three years ago, remembering all the steps and doing something dependably.
Or... you could do bash scripts? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU (Just use a VPS, bro)
I have to admit, I have limited experience with GitHub Actions though. My benchmark is GitLab mainly.
> With Buildkite, the agent is a single binary that runs on your machines.
Yes, and so it is for most other established CI systems with differing variance in orchestrator tooling to spawn agents on demand on cloud providers or Kubernetes. Isn't that the default? Am I spoiled?
> Buildkite has YAML too, but the difference is that Buildkite’s YAML is just describing a pipeline. Steps, commands, plugins. It’s a data structure, not a programming language cosplaying as a config format. When you need actual logic? You write a script. In a real language. That you can run locally. Like a human being with dignity and a will to live.
Again, isn't that the default with modern CI tools? The YAML definition is a declarative data structure, that let's me represent which steps to execute under which conditions. That's what I want from my CI tooling, right? That's why declarative pipelines are what everyone's doing right now and I haven't really heard a lot of people wanting to implement the orchestration of their entire pipeline imperatively instead and run them on a single machine.
But that's where you'll run into limitations pretty soon with Buildkite. You have `if` conditionals, but they're quite limited. You finally have `if_changed` since a few months, which you can use to run steps only if the commit / PR / tag contains changes to certain file globs, but it's again quite rudimentary. Also, you can't combine it with `if` conditionals, so you can't implement a full rebuild independent of file changes - which should be a valid feature, e.g. nightly or on main branches.
The recommended solution to all that:
> Dynamic Pipelines > In Buildkite, pipeline steps are just data. You can generate them.
To me, that's the cursed thing about Buildkite. You start your pipeline declaratively, but as soon as you branch out of the most trivial pipelines, you'll have to upload your next steps imperatively if a certain condition is met. Suddenly you'll end up with a Frankensteinian mess that looks like a declarative pipeline declaration initially, but when you look deeper you'll find a bunch of 20+ bash scripts that upload more pipeline fragments from Heredocs or other YAML files conditionally and even run templating logic on top of them. You want to have a mental model on what's happening in your pipeline upfront? You want to model dependencies between steps that are uploaded under different conditions somewhere scattered through bash scripts? Good luck with that.
I really don't see how you can market it as a feature, that you make me re-implement CI basics that other tools just have and even make me pay for it.
And I also don't see how that is more testable locally than a pipeline that's completely declared in YAML. Especially when your scripts need to interact with the buildkite-agent CLI to download artifacts, meta-data or upload artifacts, meta-data and more pipelines.
> I’ll be honest: Buildkite’s plugin system is structurally pretty similar to the GitHub Actions Marketplace. You’re still pulling in third-party code from a repo. You’re still trusting someone else’s work. I won’t pretend there’s some magic architectural difference that makes this safe.
Yep it is and I don't like either. I prefer GitLab's approach of sharing functionality and logic via references to other YAML files checked into a VCS. It's way easier to find out what's actually happening instead of tracing down third-party code in a certain version from an opaque market place.
But yes, the log experience and the possibility to upload annotations to the pipeline is quite nice compared to other tools I've used. Doesn't outweigh the disadvantages and headaches I had with it so far though.
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I think many of the critique points the author had on GitHub Actions can be avoided when just using common sense when implementing your CI pipelines. No one forces you to use every feature you can declare in your pipelines. You can still still declare larger groups of work as steps in your pipeline and implement the details imperatively in a language of your choice. But to me, it's nice to not have to implement most pipeline orchestration features myself and just use them - resulting in a clear separation of concerns between orchestration logic and actual CI work logic.
I see the appeal of GitHub for sharing open source - the interface is so much cleaner and easier to find all you are looking for (GitLab could improve there).
But for CI/CD GitHub doesn’t even come close to GitLab in the usability department, and that’s before we even talk about pricing and the free tiers. People need to give it a try and see what they are missing.
Said that - every CI sucks one way or another, Github actions is just good enough to fire up a simple job/automation which seems to be majority of use cases anyway?
I think fully production CI pipelines will always be complicated in one way or another (proper catching alone is a challenge on it's own); I really need to check out woodpeckerci (drone ci fork) tho as I had good memories about droneci, but possibly it because I was younger back then xd
