4 ms·

This stuff sounds incredibly exciting. Replacing Jenkins has been... a frustrating experience met with nothing but hollow shells of services. We want to self-h

This stuff sounds incredibly exciting. Replacing Jenkins has been... a frustrating experience met with nothing but hollow shells of services. We want to self-host, we want something that can deploy our code, we want to be able to write arbitrary jobs not tied to specific github projects. The Jenkins ecosystem is atrociously bad. Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly active, but it promotes a "just make a plugin for everything" attitude which results in things like, plugins to echo this or that, plugins to do a million things better done from the shell, etc. On top of that, the Jenkins UI is just... bad. It's ugly and it's a UX disaster. I could go on. Yet, there's nothing better than Jenkins out there right now. Drone claims to want to replace Jenkins, but doesn't even have support for arbitrary jobs. I'd love more recommendations. This is why, a while back here on HN, I asked if I could pick up the Gitlab job runner in golang and slap a different web UI on top of it that manages the jobs. This doesn't appear to be possible but I see the value in such a runner existing. Running the jobs is a critical component of such tools. I just finished setting up a complete pipeline for a new business with my cofounder: Jenkins was a big pain point. Terraform was a pain point. Ansible was a pain point. Getting a vault solution set up and done right was a massive pain point. We've been striving to make things as simple as possible for developers so I wish you the absolute best of luck in what you're doing, I'm continuously impressed with Gitlab. Email me if you have questions Sytse, I'd love to give more feedback -- email on my profile.

kbrownlees 10y ago
The new version of drone (0.5) is much better imho, although it is still in beta so can be a bit frustrating at times. They have relaxed a bunch of the constraints and removed alot of the magic. Plus plugins are alot easier to write now. (Not involved, just a happy user)
stock_toaster 10y ago
> I'd love more recommendations. I have been using buildkite lately, and it has worked rather well. You run the agent on your own hardware, and buildkite itself just acts as a coordinator and log collector.
sytse 10y ago
We don't like plugins because they are a bad user experience, make it hard to upgrade, and make it hard to improve the product. We rather see people contribute features to GitLab itself including tests. This way we can make sure they are nicely integrated in the UI and that they still work when we release a new version of GitLab. This allows users to upgrade with confidence and it allows us to make major changes to GitLab. I'm not sure what you use case it but GitLab CI is pretty extensive and I hope it has everything you need. Please let me know if there is anything missing. If you want to host your code somewhere else you can still use remote mirroring to have GitLab do the deploy. The GitLab Runner is a simple piece of software on purpose. This allows us to port it to many platforms. All the logic is in GitLab itself so it is easy to provide a lot of feedback about the status in the UI.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  The problem with Gitlab CI, last I looked at it, was the inability to untie it from gitlab and run+self host it standalone. Has this changed?
  - sytse 10y ago
    The only way to use GitLab CI is as part of GitLab. By doing this we could deeply integrate it into the interface of GitLab and make it a better user experience. If you host your code anywhere else you can use remote mirroring (EE/.com only) to use GitLab CI.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      You can't make it replace Jenkins if it can't do arbitrary jobs. I'm talking jobs without even a repository behind them. The idea of a runner that tests every commit on a repo is super useful. But Jenkins goes one step further by being essentially an arbitrary shell command runner. I use it for example as a CNC for running cleanup jobs, cronjobs etc.
      - sytse 10y ago

kbrownlees 10y ago

The new version of drone (0.5) is much better imho, although it is still in beta so can be a bit frustrating at times. They have relaxed a bunch of the constraints and removed alot of the magic. Plus plugins are alot easier to write now. (Not involved, just a happy user)

stock_toaster 10y ago

> I'd love more recommendations. I have been using buildkite lately, and it has worked rather well. You run the agent on your own hardware, and buildkite itself just acts as a coordinator and log collector.

sytse 10y ago

We don't like plugins because they are a bad user experience, make it hard to upgrade, and make it hard to improve the product. We rather see people contribute features to GitLab itself including tests. This way we can make sure they are nicely integrated in the UI and that they still work when we release a new version of GitLab. This allows users to upgrade with confidence and it allows us to make major changes to GitLab. I'm not sure what you use case it but GitLab CI is pretty extensive and I hope it has everything you need. Please let me know if there is anything missing. If you want to host your code somewhere else you can still use remote mirroring to have GitLab do the deploy. The GitLab Runner is a simple piece of software on purpose. This allows us to port it to many platforms. All the logic is in GitLab itself so it is easy to provide a lot of feedback about the status in the UI.

scrollaway 10y ago
The problem with Gitlab CI, last I looked at it, was the inability to untie it from gitlab and run+self host it standalone. Has this changed?
- sytse 10y ago
  The only way to use GitLab CI is as part of GitLab. By doing this we could deeply integrate it into the interface of GitLab and make it a better user experience. If you host your code anywhere else you can use remote mirroring (EE/.com only) to use GitLab CI.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    You can't make it replace Jenkins if it can't do arbitrary jobs. I'm talking jobs without even a repository behind them. The idea of a runner that tests every commit on a repo is super useful. But Jenkins goes one step further by being essentially an arbitrary shell command runner. I use it for example as a CNC for running cleanup jobs, cronjobs etc.
    - sytse 10y ago