15 ms·

Travis CI is no longer providing CI minutes for open source projects

523 points by jameshilliard 6y ago

I guess it was inevitable https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219216 https://twitter.com/james_hilliard/status/1336081776691843072 https://twitter.com/james_hilliard/status/133608177669184307... Hello James, Thanks for writing in. At the moment, credit allocation for OSS projects is on hold as per directives from management. Sincere apologies please. We will provide updates once we get additional approval from management. Thanks for your patience -- MK Your Friends @Travis CI Test and Deploy with Confidence.

judge2020 6y ago
As linked above, the idea of new leadership starving OSS and simply supporting existing enterprise contracts was talked about extensively in the acquisition announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251
- webmonkeyuk 6y ago
  Speaking from experience: they're not even managing to service paying customers well.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    That seems to stem from the fact they killed off pretty much the entire engineering team after the acquisition (judging by tweets I remember reading shortly afterwards).
    - jrochkind1 6y ago
      I will never again doubt what "purchase by private equity" means again, it is clear.
      - Benjammer 6y ago
        What exactly made you "doubt" this fact before now?
        jrochkind1 6y ago
        I thought maybe there were sometimes exceptions to the rule.
        jcheng 6y ago
        There are NEVER exceptions to this particular rule, at least not in tech.
      - shp0ngle 6y ago
        It really depends on who is buying. But with Travis and Idera it was pretty clear it will go this way, looking at past Idera purchases.
    - jimueller 6y ago
      The Idera way, buy product, fire devs, offshore to feature factory.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
bamboleo 6y ago
Are they trying to kill the product as fast as possible? Because waiting for a first-party solution before kicking 99% of your users out is the perfect way to do it, short of simply deleting their accounts. Good thing I was an earlier GitHub Actions adopter because now I don’t have to do as much work.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  If 99% of your users are not paying, then you have a problem. Travis cannot compete with Microsoft when it comes to deep pockets. I think it is too late to get regulators to reverse the GitHub acquisition..
- jfrunyon 6y ago
  Hah. You think GitHub Actions won't do the same in a few years once this has all quieted down? You have to be better than your competitors if you want to beat them. Until you DO beat them, that is.
  - bamboleo 6y ago
    I’ve got accustomed to free solutions coming and going. The key concept here is that I’ll be using a free product for a few more years, until a competitor comes along.
geerlingguy 6y ago
Many people are saying to those of us who _haven't_, for one reason or another, gotten completely off of Travis CI, "the writing was on the wall" or "you can't expect free forever." And I think they're missing the gravity of the situation—there were (and are still) a _ton_ of OSS projects out there that are configured to use Travis CI for their testing and build pipelines, and it's not free to switch to something else (even though there are many adequate alternatives). I wish there was another way, like providing a meager amount of build minutes, or just reducing the OSS builds to run on a few dozen servers, even if that means days-long build queues. That's better than just ending service abruptly like they did. I wrote [1] about my own plans, but I know many devs (especially for tiny side projects) just don't have the time to update them to something else, and we're likely to see a number of smaller projects kind of fall into disrepair from this. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/travis-cis-new-pricing-plan-threw-wrench-my-open-source-works https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/travis-cis-new-pricin...
- znpy 6y ago
  I honestly think this is the price that people pay for using proprietary software. The license terms changed and boom now you're out of service. If such OSS projects were running on Gitlab (either gitlab.com or selfhosted) then any of the members could have donated spare computing resources by running a gitlab runner on their prem. Many people have PCs running 24/7 and could spare a vm to lend to their favourite projects.
  - koolba 6y ago
    Running arbitrary code on a distributed network of end user PCs with network access is a recipe for a bot net. Yes it’s doable but it’s not a magic wand to claim that an open platform will solve it. The magic of Travis was that with a couple clicks of OAuth you were signed up and running builds for your own PRs. My first thought upon seeing this years ago was “How many people are using this to mine crypto?!“.
    - znpy 6y ago
      > Running arbitrary code on a distributed network of end user PCs It's a bit more complicated than that. I run gitlab and gitlab runners for a living, I can tell. First thing first, you'd have to register a runner with a specific project. So no "arbitrary code". Second thing, unless you can push a branch to the project main repository, no pipeline is ran. So for your own personal forks you'd either rely on gitlab.com-provided free minutes or you run your own runner (and tbh, it's fairly easy). Last thing: you should not think of regular end-users. Think of middle to advanced users, that have a home server or something like that (homelabbers?).
jrochkind1 6y ago
Only a few weeks ago they wrote a letter (https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement) that said "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com." Their home page at travis-ci.com still says: > Testing your open source projects is always 100% free! > Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving back to a community that gives us so much as well. That is simply not what's going on. As far as anyone can tell, they are offering some OSS which meet specific criteria (including no company funds any part of it, including paying people to work on it(?!)) free minutes in fixed monthly allotments, which you have to keep asking for every month. And there are only so many total minutes they are willing to give out, which apparently have now been frozen. How can they have written a letter only two weeks ago saying "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com"? How can their home page still say "Testing your open source projects is always 100% free!"?? At this point, it is hard to explain it as anything other than intentional manipulative dishonesty. I don't understand why they don't just say "Yes, we can no longer provide free open source accounts." They aren't actually fooling anyone, I mean people notice that they don't have free accounts anymore, right? It is a weird attempt at some kind of reality distortion. I guess you could try replying: "Credit allocation"? I don't understand, Paul Gordon wrote on Nov 24 "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com." Is this not true? I'm kinda curious what they'd say, but I guess it's just torturing poor support staff whose jobs probably aren't going to last either.
- TAForObvReasons 6y ago
  "including no company funds any part of it, including paying people to work on it(?!)" JetBrains open source licenses have a similar restriction https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ > Your project is NOT sponsored by a commercial company or organization and does NOT have paid employees > Your project does NOT provide commercial services (such as consulting or training) around the software, and does NOT distribute paid versions of the software
  - musicale 6y ago
    > Your project is NOT sponsored by a commercial company or organization and does NOT have paid employees > Your project does NOT provide commercial services (such as consulting or training) around the software, and does NOT distribute paid versions of the software Jetbrains should really take it to the next level and require all developers on your open source project to provide up-to-date proof of unemployment benefits.
daenz 6y ago
I just got an OSS project wired up using TravisCI. And during that process, I noticed OSS builds had a backlog of 5000+ jobs. It took sometimes 45 minutes for my build to process. It's a shame. Something like this should exist, but I can't blame them for not wanting to do it for free.
- cwyers 6y ago
  I don't as such blame them for not wanting to do it for free, but they did want to do it for free until they didn't, and you could argue they're under no obligation to keep doing so, but given the way they have introduced the change, I would be uncomfortable being a paying customer of theirs, too. What's to say they won't be trying to change the terms of their offering in other ways? And if so, why should I think they would get any better at doing so in a fashion that minimizes the disruption?
rezonant 6y ago
I long ago switched to CircleCI for all my builds-- it has free builds for both open source and private repositories with a simple (and comparatively inexpensive) pricing plan based on parallel builds with Windows, macOS and Linux build containers. With Github Actions on the scene now, I don't see much reason to use Travis over one of the alternatives.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  What's the benefit of circleci? I'm looking into switching from travis-ci.org to github actions, so far.
  - mmis1000 6y ago
    Speed, their main selling point. The default config uses a <del>8</del>2 core + 7.5g memory runner and capable to build simple projects in literal one minutes(includes deploy) after you push even without cache. And it seems they maintain their own apt mirror or whatever, the package install speed looks unreasonably fast. But they currently only give 250 minute (default config) per week to free account now, probably due to the runner cost.
    - sciurus 6y ago
      For anyone curious, the details on their OSS offering are at https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/oss/ https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/oss/ They give you 10,000 minutes of build time on their 2cpu/4gb workers per week with a max of 4 concurrent workers.
    - aeyes 6y ago
      Free accounts on CircleCI only have access to 2 core runners and can't run multiple jobs in parallel. Most open source projects I have seen on Travis do matrix builds which will take much longer to finish due to this restriction. Edit: Looks like you get 4 concurrent jobs if you register as an open source project.
      - 6y ago
dessant 6y ago
I've moved on back when Travis CI employees have started recommending to turn off secret filtering in Windows build logs as a workaround for a bug, then decided to turn the workaround into a fix, exposing secrets in the logs of all Windows builds. https://travis-ci.community/t/current-known-issues-please-read-this-before-posting-a-new-topic/264/10 https://travis-ci.community/t/current-known-issues-please-re... https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/1719 https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/1719
- jfrunyon 6y ago
  "Secret filtering" is buggy, broken, stupid, misleading, and just plain wrong anyway. 1) If you can cause it to be run on arbitrary code then you can cause it to reveal the secret. Even if the only output you see is a pass or fail. 2) If you can't cause it to be run on arbitrary code, then why do you need to see any output?
  - dessant 6y ago
    Unexpected behavior caused by any bug could print the variable to the build log, there is no need for malicious code to end up with compromised secrets.
    - koolba 6y ago
      Malicious code could also print the ROT13, hex, base64, or even selectively fail tests so that every failure is a bit of entropy. Filtering secrets from logs only protects accidentally dumping your environment to a log Because you left in an echo $SECRET. It doesn’t stop a determined attacker who can run arbitrary code.
      - Shish2k 6y ago
        If a feature protects against accidents, why should “but a determined attacker can work around it” stop one from using that feature?
      - dessant 6y ago
sciurus 6y ago
The situation with Travis CI is confusing, has not been communicated well by them, and is definitely not getting enough coverage for the amount of disruption it might cause. Here's what I've been able to piece together: ? 2018: Travis CI announces they are starting the process of merging travis-ci.org, which provided free builds for OSS projects, into travis-ci.com, which until then was only for paying customers. They promise OSS builds will continue to be free. ? 2020: Travis CI announces they are shutting down travis-ci.org at the end of the year and all projects have to move to travis-ci.com. They promise OSS builds will continue to be free. Early November 2020: travis-ci.com switches from providing unlimited builds for OSS to only providing 10k one-time credits by default. Projects that meet certain guidelines (e.g. no one paid to work on them) can apply for recurring credits. Later in November 2020: CI for many OSS projects that had migrated to travis-ci.com starts to fail, as they've exhausted their 10K credits. Dec 2020: If what is reported here is accurate, Travis CI stop providing any recurring OSS credits. CI breaks for the remaining OSS projects on travis-ci.com. Jan 2021: travis-ci.org shuts down. CI will be broken for all projects using it. They'll have the option of migrating to travis-ci.com, but will soon break again as they exhaust their 10k credits. I suspect that many, many projects haven't migrated from .org to .com and are going to be surprised when their CI breaks on January 1st. It looks like their only option is to start paying Travis CI or move to an alternate provider (like CircleCI or Github Actions, both of which have free tiers for OSS). If Travis CI's new owners are no longer willing to provide free CI services to OSS projects, that's understandable. I just wish they'd communicate that clearly in ways that their users won't miss. (BTW, if anyone from Travis CI is reading this, I reached out to your support team last week for help on a problem that is blocking us from potentially paying you. I haven't gotten an answer yet on ticket 23831. Any help is appreciated.)
- arp242 6y ago
  Confusing is indeed the best adjective here; I can't even easily see how many credits I have on my personal account (only for the organisation I manage, I can't find it anywher on my personal account), or how many credits a build costs; I figured it out by triggering a build and reloading the page with the credits. Besides, what's a "credit" anyway? The entire UI and communication is pretty chaotic. I suppose I need to look for alternatives – although I hate doing these kind of "plumbing" things; I'd rather be working on more useful code.
dis-sys 6y ago
> Your Friends @Travis CI > Test and Deploy with Confidence. So "my friends" at travis ci just disabled my free access to travis ci for my open source projects and I am suppose to have confidence. nice!
chubot 6y ago
I just ported the continuous build for https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ to sr.ht for this reason: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/11/fixes-and-updates.html#buildssrht-and-toil http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/11/fixes-and-updates.html#... A contributor added .travis.yml about 3 years ago, before I had ever used it. But I've been around the block enough to know that getting stuff for free is temporary. (And to be fair, I did like Travis CI free service a lot better than I thought I would.) So when I needed to enhance the continuous build back in January, I did it with a PORTABLE SHELL SCRIPT, NOT with yaml. Both Travis CI and sr.ht provide Linux VMs, which are easily operated with a shell script. The script called "Toil" does the following: 1. Configures which steps are run in which build tasks (both Travis CI and sr.ht can run multiple tasks in parallel for each commit) 2. Logs each step, times it, summarizes failure/success 3. Archives/compresses the logs 3. Publishes the result to my own domain, which is A LOT FASTER than the Travis CI dashboard. (sr.ht is very fast too; it has a great web design.) This ended up working great, so I have multiple CI services running the same jobs, and publishing to the same place: http://travis-ci.oilshell.org/ http://travis-ci.oilshell.org/ (I plan to create srht.oilshell.org for security reasons; it isn't ideal that both services have a key to publish to the same domain.) ---- I think this is the future of the Oil project: shell scripts to enable portability across clouds. If you want to be fancy, it's a distributed or decentralized shell. This is natural because shell already coordinates processes on a single machine. - A distributed shell coordinates processes across multiple machines (under the same domain of trust) - A decentralized one does so across domains of trust (across clouds) ----- Really great work in this direction is gg: https://buttondown.email/nelhage/archive/papers-i-love-gg/ https://buttondown.email/nelhage/archive/papers-i-love-gg/ comments: https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg which is a tool that runs distributed programs across multiple FaaS providers like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, etc. https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg My "toil" script is a lot more basic, but an analogous idea. I would like to create a slightly tighter but improved abstraction that runs on multiple cloud services. Notes on gg here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Distributed-Shell https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Distributed-Shell If anyone wants to help, get in touch! If you are pissed off about Travis then you might want this :) I think these kinds of multi-cloud setups are inevitable given the incentives and resources of each party, and they already exist (probably in a pretty ugly/fragile form).
joshxyz 6y ago
Rekt
zmmmmm 6y ago
Ouch. The problem is, if you assume good will from Travis, then this is a VERY drastic action to take since it strongly contradicts their past statements. From that you would infer, Travis is in serious trouble and I would worry a lot about building in dependencies on it as a paying customer. On the other hand, if you assume bad will from Travis .... well, then that also would mean you should not use them as a paying customer. So it's just bad.
chillfox 6y ago
Gitlab provides 400 minutes a month on their free plan and you can use that on private projects, not just OSS. On top of that it is easy to setup a private CI runner on a $5 month VM.
- dnsmichi 6y ago
  Open source projects can also apply for our OSS program and get more CI minutes and features for free :) https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ A list of fellow OSS projects can be found at https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/projects/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/projects/
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    How many more minutes? The page you link to doesn't seem to have details.
tonymet 6y ago
In response to the scorn in the comments. Free SAAS resources are like Costco samplers. Be grateful when they are handed out, and be prepared for them to be taken away. These things do cost money, and like drugs are given away to make you a customer – but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
- reificator 6y ago
  Sure, but on the other hand when Costco claims they're always going to have free samples, then slashes the hours they serve free samples down to an hour a week, and then says you have to have a gold-star membership to have samples, and then cuts the samples down to plain, individual saltine crackers and tortilla chips, and then they start limiting them to one per family, all while proclaiming that they love offering free samples in all of their coupon books... ...maybe they're not doing so well financially and you should start looking at a Sam's Club membership instead of renewing, because this hypothetical Costco might not be around for a full year's membership.
dave_sid 6y ago
Have you tried using Jenkins? You should use that instead.
- jaquers 6y ago
  I agree - it's great but... is there a hosted solution? If I just wanna run lint and unit tests on PRs for my shitty open-source project, Jenkins is overkill and not really viable.
empyrical 6y ago
Travis CI was, to my knowledge, the only CI provider that let you test projects on IBM Power and Z. [1] Are there any alternatives? [1] https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-11-12-multi-cpu-architecture-ibm-power-ibm-z https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-11-12-multi-cpu-architecture...
- jjasghar 6y ago
  Yep, you're correct. This is causing some interesting conversations in those spaces now.
- adamretter 6y ago
  If it's open source you can approach Open Source Lab at OSU for CI on Z Series.
ndesaulniers 6y ago
Our CI ran out on November 20th and hasn't run since. :( I emailed them last week; I suspect I'll receive a similar email, soon!
- ndesaulniers 6y ago
  Just learned GitHub Actions; seems straightforward...will work on migrating...
tbodt 6y ago
The build execution bits of Travis appear to be open source: https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build https://github.com/travis-ci/worker https://github.com/travis-ci/worker It should be possible to make a GitHub action that runs an existing .travis.yml.
- hakre 6y ago
  It's already possible, albeit but not a full port: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml The action executes the stage scripts making that part portable at first. It helps a lot migrating as not everything needs to be rewritten at once while already reducing the build-times on Travis. Language handling is a different beast, but I had the same thought that with some Ruby know-how a port of the travis-build as a whole could be done. If not even running locally.
koreanguy 6y ago
travis ci alternatives open source Bamboo. ... TeamCity. ... Appveyor. ... Codeship. lots more use google
lewispringle 6y ago
I switched to github actions. Works better than travis ci ever did. So far appears perfectly free for open source projects. https://github.com/SophistSolutions/Stroika/actions?query=branch%3Av2.1-Release https://github.com/SophistSolutions/Stroika/actions?query=br...
lopatin 6y ago
Looks like this is what happens when unique companies with a vision hire mediocre business execs. I'm sure there are other ways to monetize while keeping OSS actually free. But you won't get there when your top decision makers treat the core user base with contempt. Now they're yet another CI company I can ignore. I'll be happy to learn another API (Github Actions) or even pay for CI. And it leaves the door open for other innovators (now that you have stopped innovating). Great job all around guys.
throw_m239339 6y ago
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or whatever could have bought Travis in order to make it remain free. All these companies rely heavily on open source work thus open source project CI. None of them did. Well that's the result of all this. People are now moving to github actions, which are fine, but for how long github actions are going to be free for OSS projects as well? One cannot expect all these freebees to last forever, that's why open source needs financing like any other software development.
- jdsully 6y ago
  Microsoft bought GitHub and offers github actions. No need for them to also buy Travis. If Microsoft buying Travis would have "saved" it, then why are you worried about GitHub actions' future?
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    > Microsoft bought GitHub and offers github actions. No need for them to also buy Travis. If Microsoft buying Travis would have "saved" it, then why are you worried about GitHub actions' future? I don't know ... cause ending travis free CI is going to like... disrupt an entire ecosystem of OSS projects. Every single maintainer doesn't have the time to learn and set up github actions... Isn't that obvious?
    - jdsully 6y ago
      I migrated KeyDB, it didn't take very long at all and now my tests are much more reliable.
kats 6y ago
Probably the volume of users in the free tier is too big so they need to reduce expenses. It might be like giving away free storage space, too. There may be 0.001% of users that have a crazy amount of usage compared to average. At least my OSS project got to have many free builds, props to Travis CI.
nn3 6y ago
The question is how long the free party at github actions will last. That must be a considerable drain for github's Microsoft internal budget. I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability.
- LASR 6y ago
  Considering they spent over half a billion dollars on Marketing spend for Windows Phone 7, I think they can afford to support some CI actions for OSS. Really it’s marketing spend for them to establish themselves as OSS-friendly. Nadella is just getting a lot more for the money than Ballmer did.
- alexeldeib 6y ago
  Think of it more as part of a suite and it makes sense: host your code on GitHub, use actions to deploy them, and deploy them to Azure. Make up money on 2 from 1 and 3. Google cloudbuild has a free tier too. Looks like AWS Codebuild has a comparable free tier too (do people use that?) (MS employee, not anything related to this though).
- littlecranky67 6y ago
  Don't forget that providing the service for free to open source projects brings in money as open source developers in their younger years (school, college, university) tend to be low on budget, but are likely to use something they already know when they start to work for companies later on in their career.
- merijnv 6y ago
  > I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability. Honestly, I don't really think so. I think MS's goal for GitHub is to be a "loss leader" to keep developer mindshare. They lost a lot of developer mindshare to linux, open source, etc. in the migration to the web and cloud. Providing GitHub and CI for free to open source/students is a great way to keep developer mindshare. Make sure it's nicely integrate into Azure cloud for deployment and devops and you have a streamlined pipeline of leading large numbers of developers to your cloud platform.
p1necone 6y ago
If anyone's looking for something to use for personal projects I currently use wercker and it's really easy to use (specify docker box, run commands) and has a free tier (but it's owned by Oracle so I still worry in the back of my head that they'll fuck it up any day now). There's also Github Actions and Bitbucket Pipelines which I think are very similar in style, and also have free tiers. There's also the "Raspberry PI in a closet" option, which I might explore over the Christmas holidays. Dockerhub being free is something else I can't see lasting forever, their bandwidth costs must be immense? Although maybe they make enough from enterprise contracts to make up for it?
- alexeldeib 6y ago
  Have you seen https://www.docker.com/blog/scaling-docker-to-serve-millions-more-developers-network-egress/ https://www.docker.com/blog/scaling-docker-to-serve-millions... and https://www.docker.com/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-upcoming-docker-hub-rate-limiting/ https://www.docker.com/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-upco... ? And yes, paid accounts are exempt. But the costs are catching up.
fogfish 6y ago
Travis CI was good and easy to use for open source projects. However, reality is... GitHub actions is much easier solution for OSS.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
This may be a bit sudden. But instead of heaping scorn on them, I just feel grateful for the millions they must have invested in OSS. It's unlikely they are out to hurt anybody. I'd guess the vast majority of people there, now and in the past, would love to be able to continue doing so. So, if anyone can come up with the name for whoever bought them, a sale that was probably done with little alternatives already, then hate those peoples with all you got, got ahead[1]. But don't take it out on the people that helped you all those years. Not even if they screwed up the endgame by, maybe, being too optimistic for a week too long. [1]: But not too many death threats, maybe. Even just for purely selfish reasons, one wouldn't want commitments to OSS become a poison pill that makes any company providing such services toxic to investors.
- alpb 6y ago
  The original Travis CI GmbH, a German company, company is what the OSS community should be thankful for. They’ve been literally running build needs for at least half of GitHub. However; I don’t think anyone needs to be grateful for Idera Inc, an American company, which has done nothing so far but ruining Travis CI for the rest of the world but themselves. Thankfully the world has organically moved on to things like GitHub actions, but this personally will impact me as I have many repos out there that get 1 contrib/year, which would use maybe 2-3 minutes/yr. Lesson of the story here: There’s nothing such as free, even if there is, it will not last forever.
  - fy20 6y ago
    > done nothing so far but ruining Travis CI for the rest of the world but themselves Don't forget the private equity firm and it's employees have a job to do as well - provide good returns on investments. That doesn't just benefit the wealthy, but if you have a pension fund (state or private) you are probably benefiting from it as well. > Lesson of the story here: There’s nothing such as free, even if there is, it will not last forever. In this economy, sadly no.
- josteink 6y ago
  > But instead of heaping scorn on them, I just feel grateful for the millions they must have invested in OSS. Agreed. They've done good stuff for OSS up until now, and they deserve credit for that. No need to feel bitter or entitled over something we've received 100% for free. But despite that, Travis-CI is not serving my (or other's) OSS needs right now, and people are obviously looking for alternatives. There's nothing wrong with that.
alien_ 6y ago
This is unfortunate and will cause a lot of migration work, and it was poorly communicated so I can understand the frustration but I'm thankful to Travis CI for their past services. My project only needs about 30m of build time monthly and the migration to something else may cost me a few hours of work. At my hourly rate that may be significant enough, so for a while I would rather pay a small monthly fee to cover my limited needs.
robinduckett 6y ago
Meh, do I really need continuous integration for my OSS project? Although inconvenient, it is possible to run these tests on my own computer before publishing.
greggman3 6y ago
When they had the previous announcement I switched my open source projects to GitHub actions. I get that some people will not want more GitHub but I figured given all the configuration is open and checked into your repo someone will eventually make an open source clone that can read the same configs . I also really like the way build scripts can be referenced by url/id such that I can just reference existing scripts made by other people. Super nice!
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  > I also really like the way build scripts can be referenced by url/id such that I can just reference existing scripts made by other people. Super nice! I'm not familiar with that feature, can you give a link to docs/example/more info?
  - greggman3 6y ago
    See this example action, it just "uses" other scripts https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder docs https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#jobsjob_idstepsuses https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/refe...
    - jrochkind1 6y ago
      Thanks! Still not sure what you mean about https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder I see the workflows at: https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/master/.github/workflows/lint.yml https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/... and https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/master/.github/workflows/test.yml https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/... What about them is using other scripts? Oh, do you jsut mean things like `uses: actions/setup-node@v1` is using that standard actions/setup-node "step"? Yeah, you can refrence steps defined elsewhere, ok, I get it! For some reason I was thinking you meant something else. OK, thanks!
wraptile 6y ago
Wasn't it kinda apparent that all of these 3rd party CI services will go the way of the dodo now that github actions and gitlabci exist? How could they compete with a platform built-in CI?
josteink 6y ago
Thanks! That was the final push I honestly needed. Now I've migrated my remaining 10+ Travis-CI builds to a different CI-provider (GitHub Actions). It feels like a solid upgrade.
tome 6y ago
If CI builds were defined in a programming language that provided clear semantics, abstraction and modularity then porting to a new build host would be 10x easier. It would be an "annoying" or "fiddly" level of work rather than a time sink costing hours and hours.
- brodock 6y ago
  considering how similar many CI providers are in terms of how you write your tests, I would say that this is either very achievable or not that worth it. you already can do a lot by writing a bunch of scripts that will be executed on a CI, and just fiddle with differences in like metadata/artifact/how you declare your containers. and while you are there, you can generate the code CI definitions for more than one CI provider (think of it like "multi-cloud" but for CI approach.
- chubot 6y ago
  Yup, that's where I want to take the Oil shell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25340456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25340456 Continuous builds are already written in YAML + shell. Platforms like Github Actions and Travis CI basically use YAML as a really bad syntax for shell scripts (with their own if statements!), and then embed more shell as strings. So Oil should basically generate JSON like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945449 and allow you to embed unevaluated (but parsed) literal shell blocks. So I'm adding the missing "declarative" part to shell. That alone gets you pretty far. Although there are some more language semantics that most builds need, like coarse-grained dependencies, ephemeral or persistent state, etc. gg is a related "multi cloud" system that's very interesting: https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg I'm writing a blog post about this right now! ---- An improved shell is the natural language for this problem because shell is for gluing tasks together. It's the language of heterogeneity. I view Make as a form of shell with dependencies, and Make has already been parallelized and distributed by many systems going back many years.
totorovirus 6y ago
how much are they spending btw?
oxfordmale 6y ago
What a travisty...okay, I will go pack my bags.
kall 6y ago
A smart, or at least nice, move for github wpuld be to provide a one-click actions migration at least for the simple travis configs that the majority of projects use.
mhd 6y ago
Given the company's track record with ExtJS and Delphi, not surprising to me in the least.
akx 6y ago
On this note, I started a little project to convert Travis.yml workflows to GitHub Actions: https://akx.github.io/travis-to-github-actions/ https://akx.github.io/travis-to-github-actions/ Currently it deals with rudimentary Python and Node.js workflows, but contributions are naturally welcome.
- hakre 6y ago
  Looks nice, thanks for sharing. For the part to execute the run-script I'm currently going with a github-action itself: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml it's based on the original travis-build so that utils like "travis_retry" are still available. each command in the asserted stages (e.g. before_install, install) directly breaks the build while the script runs through and gives the fail exit at the end (while showing the commands run and their result as on travis, asserted stages are with folding). might be a good addition to the online converter. the other parts of the workflow (vm setup, caches, services, matrix etc.) I find hard to port automatically. this needs much more insight and often is specific to the languages. and then it's "relatively easy". but an automatic mapping from the many languages travis supported looks overwhelming. perhaps better is to actually have the whole travis-build project as a github action (but I'm not fluent with ruby).
echopom 6y ago
Nothing surprising here. Travis CI made their exit few months ago with a Venture Firm , every venture firm use the same model of "Hibernation" to get cashflow from the platform without new investment. Only two option to do so : - increasing price - reducing cost Removing the "0$" price for Open Source Project is a disguised way to increase the price... It's likely the majority of the staff was laid off and the project is now hibernating living from acquired customers not adding new feature or change. Just being used as a source of Corporate Cash Flow.
nojvek 6y ago
Moving off TravisCI was a good decision. A couple of months back their support stopped responding even though we were paying TravisCI significant sums of money. Their service had all sorts of glitches and wasn’t very reliable. If they were walking away from people who wanted to give them money, I can imagine they don’t give a shit about OSS projects where they lose money. TravisCI taught me a hard lesson. Relying on 3rd party for CI is a losing bet if you care about reliability and guaranteed capacity.
gt565k 6y ago
I find it funny people are up in arms and complaining, out of all places, on HN, where start-up culture should be more prevalent and aware of the costs it takes to run a business and maintain its operational capacity. Nothing is free. It might be free to you, but Travis CI has to pay for the compute resources to run your free builds. At the end of the day, never build your product or infrastructure on free services without planning on eventually paying for it and budgeting for it. If you want a full CI/CD pipeline, there's plenty of open source tools. You can run it on your own hardware, which is what most do for builds as it's cheaper, or incorporate AWS spot instances if you want to run at the lowest cloud compute cost.

523 points by jameshilliard 6y ago

judge2020 6y ago

As linked above, the idea of new leadership starving OSS and simply supporting existing enterprise contracts was talked about extensively in the acquisition announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251

webmonkeyuk 6y ago
Speaking from experience: they're not even managing to service paying customers well.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  That seems to stem from the fact they killed off pretty much the entire engineering team after the acquisition (judging by tweets I remember reading shortly afterwards).
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    I will never again doubt what "purchase by private equity" means again, it is clear.
    - Benjammer 6y ago
      What exactly made you "doubt" this fact before now?
      - jrochkind1 6y ago
        I thought maybe there were sometimes exceptions to the rule.
        jcheng 6y ago
        There are NEVER exceptions to this particular rule, at least not in tech.
    - shp0ngle 6y ago
      It really depends on who is buying. But with Travis and Idera it was pretty clear it will go this way, looking at past Idera purchases.
  - jimueller 6y ago
    The Idera way, buy product, fire devs, offshore to feature factory.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

bamboleo 6y ago

Are they trying to kill the product as fast as possible? Because waiting for a first-party solution before kicking 99% of your users out is the perfect way to do it, short of simply deleting their accounts. Good thing I was an earlier GitHub Actions adopter because now I don’t have to do as much work.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago
If 99% of your users are not paying, then you have a problem. Travis cannot compete with Microsoft when it comes to deep pockets. I think it is too late to get regulators to reverse the GitHub acquisition..
jfrunyon 6y ago
Hah. You think GitHub Actions won't do the same in a few years once this has all quieted down? You have to be better than your competitors if you want to beat them. Until you DO beat them, that is.
- bamboleo 6y ago
  I’ve got accustomed to free solutions coming and going. The key concept here is that I’ll be using a free product for a few more years, until a competitor comes along.

geerlingguy 6y ago

Many people are saying to those of us who _haven't_, for one reason or another, gotten completely off of Travis CI, "the writing was on the wall" or "you can't expect free forever." And I think they're missing the gravity of the situation—there were (and are still) a _ton_ of OSS projects out there that are configured to use Travis CI for their testing and build pipelines, and it's not free to switch to something else (even though there are many adequate alternatives). I wish there was another way, like providing a meager amount of build minutes, or just reducing the OSS builds to run on a few dozen servers, even if that means days-long build queues. That's better than just ending service abruptly like they did. I wrote [1] about my own plans, but I know many devs (especially for tiny side projects) just don't have the time to update them to something else, and we're likely to see a number of smaller projects kind of fall into disrepair from this. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/travis-cis-new-pricing-plan-threw-wrench-my-open-source-works https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/travis-cis-new-pricin...

znpy 6y ago
I honestly think this is the price that people pay for using proprietary software. The license terms changed and boom now you're out of service. If such OSS projects were running on Gitlab (either gitlab.com or selfhosted) then any of the members could have donated spare computing resources by running a gitlab runner on their prem. Many people have PCs running 24/7 and could spare a vm to lend to their favourite projects.
- koolba 6y ago
  Running arbitrary code on a distributed network of end user PCs with network access is a recipe for a bot net. Yes it’s doable but it’s not a magic wand to claim that an open platform will solve it. The magic of Travis was that with a couple clicks of OAuth you were signed up and running builds for your own PRs. My first thought upon seeing this years ago was “How many people are using this to mine crypto?!“.
  - znpy 6y ago
    > Running arbitrary code on a distributed network of end user PCs It's a bit more complicated than that. I run gitlab and gitlab runners for a living, I can tell. First thing first, you'd have to register a runner with a specific project. So no "arbitrary code". Second thing, unless you can push a branch to the project main repository, no pipeline is ran. So for your own personal forks you'd either rely on gitlab.com-provided free minutes or you run your own runner (and tbh, it's fairly easy). Last thing: you should not think of regular end-users. Think of middle to advanced users, that have a home server or something like that (homelabbers?).

jrochkind1 6y ago

Only a few weeks ago they wrote a letter (https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement) that said "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com." Their home page at travis-ci.com still says: > Testing your open source projects is always 100% free! > Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving back to a community that gives us so much as well. That is simply not what's going on. As far as anyone can tell, they are offering some OSS which meet specific criteria (including no company funds any part of it, including paying people to work on it(?!)) free minutes in fixed monthly allotments, which you have to keep asking for every month. And there are only so many total minutes they are willing to give out, which apparently have now been frozen. How can they have written a letter only two weeks ago saying "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com"? How can their home page still say "Testing your open source projects is always 100% free!"?? At this point, it is hard to explain it as anything other than intentional manipulative dishonesty. I don't understand why they don't just say "Yes, we can no longer provide free open source accounts." They aren't actually fooling anyone, I mean people notice that they don't have free accounts anymore, right? It is a weird attempt at some kind of reality distortion. I guess you could try replying: "Credit allocation"? I don't understand, Paul Gordon wrote on Nov 24 "Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com." Is this not true? I'm kinda curious what they'd say, but I guess it's just torturing poor support staff whose jobs probably aren't going to last either.

TAForObvReasons 6y ago
"including no company funds any part of it, including paying people to work on it(?!)" JetBrains open source licenses have a similar restriction https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ > Your project is NOT sponsored by a commercial company or organization and does NOT have paid employees > Your project does NOT provide commercial services (such as consulting or training) around the software, and does NOT distribute paid versions of the software
- musicale 6y ago
  > Your project is NOT sponsored by a commercial company or organization and does NOT have paid employees > Your project does NOT provide commercial services (such as consulting or training) around the software, and does NOT distribute paid versions of the software Jetbrains should really take it to the next level and require all developers on your open source project to provide up-to-date proof of unemployment benefits.

daenz 6y ago

I just got an OSS project wired up using TravisCI. And during that process, I noticed OSS builds had a backlog of 5000+ jobs. It took sometimes 45 minutes for my build to process. It's a shame. Something like this should exist, but I can't blame them for not wanting to do it for free.

cwyers 6y ago
I don't as such blame them for not wanting to do it for free, but they did want to do it for free until they didn't, and you could argue they're under no obligation to keep doing so, but given the way they have introduced the change, I would be uncomfortable being a paying customer of theirs, too. What's to say they won't be trying to change the terms of their offering in other ways? And if so, why should I think they would get any better at doing so in a fashion that minimizes the disruption?

rezonant 6y ago

I long ago switched to CircleCI for all my builds-- it has free builds for both open source and private repositories with a simple (and comparatively inexpensive) pricing plan based on parallel builds with Windows, macOS and Linux build containers. With Github Actions on the scene now, I don't see much reason to use Travis over one of the alternatives.

kzrdude 6y ago
What's the benefit of circleci? I'm looking into switching from travis-ci.org to github actions, so far.
- mmis1000 6y ago
  Speed, their main selling point. The default config uses a <del>8</del>2 core + 7.5g memory runner and capable to build simple projects in literal one minutes(includes deploy) after you push even without cache. And it seems they maintain their own apt mirror or whatever, the package install speed looks unreasonably fast. But they currently only give 250 minute (default config) per week to free account now, probably due to the runner cost.
  - sciurus 6y ago
    For anyone curious, the details on their OSS offering are at https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/oss/ https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/oss/ They give you 10,000 minutes of build time on their 2cpu/4gb workers per week with a max of 4 concurrent workers.
  - aeyes 6y ago
    Free accounts on CircleCI only have access to 2 core runners and can't run multiple jobs in parallel. Most open source projects I have seen on Travis do matrix builds which will take much longer to finish due to this restriction. Edit: Looks like you get 4 concurrent jobs if you register as an open source project.
    - 6y ago

dessant 6y ago

I've moved on back when Travis CI employees have started recommending to turn off secret filtering in Windows build logs as a workaround for a bug, then decided to turn the workaround into a fix, exposing secrets in the logs of all Windows builds. https://travis-ci.community/t/current-known-issues-please-read-this-before-posting-a-new-topic/264/10 https://travis-ci.community/t/current-known-issues-please-re... https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/1719 https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/1719

jfrunyon 6y ago
"Secret filtering" is buggy, broken, stupid, misleading, and just plain wrong anyway. 1) If you can cause it to be run on arbitrary code then you can cause it to reveal the secret. Even if the only output you see is a pass or fail. 2) If you can't cause it to be run on arbitrary code, then why do you need to see any output?
- dessant 6y ago
  Unexpected behavior caused by any bug could print the variable to the build log, there is no need for malicious code to end up with compromised secrets.
  - koolba 6y ago
    Malicious code could also print the ROT13, hex, base64, or even selectively fail tests so that every failure is a bit of entropy. Filtering secrets from logs only protects accidentally dumping your environment to a log Because you left in an echo $SECRET. It doesn’t stop a determined attacker who can run arbitrary code.
    - Shish2k 6y ago
      If a feature protects against accidents, why should “but a determined attacker can work around it” stop one from using that feature?
    - dessant 6y ago

sciurus 6y ago

The situation with Travis CI is confusing, has not been communicated well by them, and is definitely not getting enough coverage for the amount of disruption it might cause. Here's what I've been able to piece together: ? 2018: Travis CI announces they are starting the process of merging travis-ci.org, which provided free builds for OSS projects, into travis-ci.com, which until then was only for paying customers. They promise OSS builds will continue to be free. ? 2020: Travis CI announces they are shutting down travis-ci.org at the end of the year and all projects have to move to travis-ci.com. They promise OSS builds will continue to be free. Early November 2020: travis-ci.com switches from providing unlimited builds for OSS to only providing 10k one-time credits by default. Projects that meet certain guidelines (e.g. no one paid to work on them) can apply for recurring credits. Later in November 2020: CI for many OSS projects that had migrated to travis-ci.com starts to fail, as they've exhausted their 10K credits. Dec 2020: If what is reported here is accurate, Travis CI stop providing any recurring OSS credits. CI breaks for the remaining OSS projects on travis-ci.com. Jan 2021: travis-ci.org shuts down. CI will be broken for all projects using it. They'll have the option of migrating to travis-ci.com, but will soon break again as they exhaust their 10k credits. I suspect that many, many projects haven't migrated from .org to .com and are going to be surprised when their CI breaks on January 1st. It looks like their only option is to start paying Travis CI or move to an alternate provider (like CircleCI or Github Actions, both of which have free tiers for OSS). If Travis CI's new owners are no longer willing to provide free CI services to OSS projects, that's understandable. I just wish they'd communicate that clearly in ways that their users won't miss. (BTW, if anyone from Travis CI is reading this, I reached out to your support team last week for help on a problem that is blocking us from potentially paying you. I haven't gotten an answer yet on ticket 23831. Any help is appreciated.)

arp242 6y ago
Confusing is indeed the best adjective here; I can't even easily see how many credits I have on my personal account (only for the organisation I manage, I can't find it anywher on my personal account), or how many credits a build costs; I figured it out by triggering a build and reloading the page with the credits. Besides, what's a "credit" anyway? The entire UI and communication is pretty chaotic. I suppose I need to look for alternatives – although I hate doing these kind of "plumbing" things; I'd rather be working on more useful code.

dis-sys 6y ago

> Your Friends @Travis CI > Test and Deploy with Confidence. So "my friends" at travis ci just disabled my free access to travis ci for my open source projects and I am suppose to have confidence. nice!

chubot 6y ago

I just ported the continuous build for https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ to sr.ht for this reason: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/11/fixes-and-updates.html#buildssrht-and-toil http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/11/fixes-and-updates.html#... A contributor added .travis.yml about 3 years ago, before I had ever used it. But I've been around the block enough to know that getting stuff for free is temporary. (And to be fair, I did like Travis CI free service a lot better than I thought I would.) So when I needed to enhance the continuous build back in January, I did it with a PORTABLE SHELL SCRIPT, NOT with yaml. Both Travis CI and sr.ht provide Linux VMs, which are easily operated with a shell script. The script called "Toil" does the following: 1. Configures which steps are run in which build tasks (both Travis CI and sr.ht can run multiple tasks in parallel for each commit) 2. Logs each step, times it, summarizes failure/success 3. Archives/compresses the logs 3. Publishes the result to my own domain, which is A LOT FASTER than the Travis CI dashboard. (sr.ht is very fast too; it has a great web design.) This ended up working great, so I have multiple CI services running the same jobs, and publishing to the same place: http://travis-ci.oilshell.org/ http://travis-ci.oilshell.org/ (I plan to create srht.oilshell.org for security reasons; it isn't ideal that both services have a key to publish to the same domain.) ---- I think this is the future of the Oil project: shell scripts to enable portability across clouds. If you want to be fancy, it's a distributed or decentralized shell. This is natural because shell already coordinates processes on a single machine. - A distributed shell coordinates processes across multiple machines (under the same domain of trust) - A decentralized one does so across domains of trust (across clouds) ----- Really great work in this direction is gg: https://buttondown.email/nelhage/archive/papers-i-love-gg/ https://buttondown.email/nelhage/archive/papers-i-love-gg/ comments: https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg which is a tool that runs distributed programs across multiple FaaS providers like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, etc. https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg My "toil" script is a lot more basic, but an analogous idea. I would like to create a slightly tighter but improved abstraction that runs on multiple cloud services. Notes on gg here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Distributed-Shell https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Distributed-Shell If anyone wants to help, get in touch! If you are pissed off about Travis then you might want this :) I think these kinds of multi-cloud setups are inevitable given the incentives and resources of each party, and they already exist (probably in a pretty ugly/fragile form).

joshxyz 6y ago

Rekt

zmmmmm 6y ago

Ouch. The problem is, if you assume good will from Travis, then this is a VERY drastic action to take since it strongly contradicts their past statements. From that you would infer, Travis is in serious trouble and I would worry a lot about building in dependencies on it as a paying customer. On the other hand, if you assume bad will from Travis .... well, then that also would mean you should not use them as a paying customer. So it's just bad.

chillfox 6y ago

Gitlab provides 400 minutes a month on their free plan and you can use that on private projects, not just OSS. On top of that it is easy to setup a private CI runner on a $5 month VM.

dnsmichi 6y ago
Open source projects can also apply for our OSS program and get more CI minutes and features for free :) https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ A list of fellow OSS projects can be found at https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/projects/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/projects/
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  How many more minutes? The page you link to doesn't seem to have details.

tonymet 6y ago

In response to the scorn in the comments. Free SAAS resources are like Costco samplers. Be grateful when they are handed out, and be prepared for them to be taken away. These things do cost money, and like drugs are given away to make you a customer – but there's no such thing as a free lunch.

reificator 6y ago
Sure, but on the other hand when Costco claims they're always going to have free samples, then slashes the hours they serve free samples down to an hour a week, and then says you have to have a gold-star membership to have samples, and then cuts the samples down to plain, individual saltine crackers and tortilla chips, and then they start limiting them to one per family, all while proclaiming that they love offering free samples in all of their coupon books... ...maybe they're not doing so well financially and you should start looking at a Sam's Club membership instead of renewing, because this hypothetical Costco might not be around for a full year's membership.

dave_sid 6y ago

Have you tried using Jenkins? You should use that instead.

jaquers 6y ago
I agree - it's great but... is there a hosted solution? If I just wanna run lint and unit tests on PRs for my shitty open-source project, Jenkins is overkill and not really viable.

empyrical 6y ago

Travis CI was, to my knowledge, the only CI provider that let you test projects on IBM Power and Z. [1] Are there any alternatives? [1] https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-11-12-multi-cpu-architecture-ibm-power-ibm-z https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-11-12-multi-cpu-architecture...

jjasghar 6y ago
Yep, you're correct. This is causing some interesting conversations in those spaces now.
adamretter 6y ago
If it's open source you can approach Open Source Lab at OSU for CI on Z Series.

ndesaulniers 6y ago

Our CI ran out on November 20th and hasn't run since. :( I emailed them last week; I suspect I'll receive a similar email, soon!

ndesaulniers 6y ago
Just learned GitHub Actions; seems straightforward...will work on migrating...

tbodt 6y ago

The build execution bits of Travis appear to be open source: https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build https://github.com/travis-ci/worker https://github.com/travis-ci/worker It should be possible to make a GitHub action that runs an existing .travis.yml.

hakre 6y ago
It's already possible, albeit but not a full port: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml The action executes the stage scripts making that part portable at first. It helps a lot migrating as not everything needs to be rewritten at once while already reducing the build-times on Travis. Language handling is a different beast, but I had the same thought that with some Ruby know-how a port of the travis-build as a whole could be done. If not even running locally.

koreanguy 6y ago

travis ci alternatives open source Bamboo. ... TeamCity. ... Appveyor. ... Codeship. lots more use google

lewispringle 6y ago

I switched to github actions. Works better than travis ci ever did. So far appears perfectly free for open source projects. https://github.com/SophistSolutions/Stroika/actions?query=branch%3Av2.1-Release https://github.com/SophistSolutions/Stroika/actions?query=br...

lopatin 6y ago

Looks like this is what happens when unique companies with a vision hire mediocre business execs. I'm sure there are other ways to monetize while keeping OSS actually free. But you won't get there when your top decision makers treat the core user base with contempt. Now they're yet another CI company I can ignore. I'll be happy to learn another API (Github Actions) or even pay for CI. And it leaves the door open for other innovators (now that you have stopped innovating). Great job all around guys.

throw_m239339 6y ago

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or whatever could have bought Travis in order to make it remain free. All these companies rely heavily on open source work thus open source project CI. None of them did. Well that's the result of all this. People are now moving to github actions, which are fine, but for how long github actions are going to be free for OSS projects as well? One cannot expect all these freebees to last forever, that's why open source needs financing like any other software development.

jdsully 6y ago
Microsoft bought GitHub and offers github actions. No need for them to also buy Travis. If Microsoft buying Travis would have "saved" it, then why are you worried about GitHub actions' future?
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Microsoft bought GitHub and offers github actions. No need for them to also buy Travis. If Microsoft buying Travis would have "saved" it, then why are you worried about GitHub actions' future? I don't know ... cause ending travis free CI is going to like... disrupt an entire ecosystem of OSS projects. Every single maintainer doesn't have the time to learn and set up github actions... Isn't that obvious?
  - jdsully 6y ago
    I migrated KeyDB, it didn't take very long at all and now my tests are much more reliable.

kats 6y ago

Probably the volume of users in the free tier is too big so they need to reduce expenses. It might be like giving away free storage space, too. There may be 0.001% of users that have a crazy amount of usage compared to average. At least my OSS project got to have many free builds, props to Travis CI.

nn3 6y ago

The question is how long the free party at github actions will last. That must be a considerable drain for github's Microsoft internal budget. I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability.

LASR 6y ago
Considering they spent over half a billion dollars on Marketing spend for Windows Phone 7, I think they can afford to support some CI actions for OSS. Really it’s marketing spend for them to establish themselves as OSS-friendly. Nadella is just getting a lot more for the money than Ballmer did.
alexeldeib 6y ago
Think of it more as part of a suite and it makes sense: host your code on GitHub, use actions to deploy them, and deploy them to Azure. Make up money on 2 from 1 and 3. Google cloudbuild has a free tier too. Looks like AWS Codebuild has a comparable free tier too (do people use that?) (MS employee, not anything related to this though).
littlecranky67 6y ago
Don't forget that providing the service for free to open source projects brings in money as open source developers in their younger years (school, college, university) tend to be low on budget, but are likely to use something they already know when they start to work for companies later on in their career.
merijnv 6y ago
> I predict that will eventually end too as they aim towards profitability. Honestly, I don't really think so. I think MS's goal for GitHub is to be a "loss leader" to keep developer mindshare. They lost a lot of developer mindshare to linux, open source, etc. in the migration to the web and cloud. Providing GitHub and CI for free to open source/students is a great way to keep developer mindshare. Make sure it's nicely integrate into Azure cloud for deployment and devops and you have a streamlined pipeline of leading large numbers of developers to your cloud platform.

p1necone 6y ago

If anyone's looking for something to use for personal projects I currently use wercker and it's really easy to use (specify docker box, run commands) and has a free tier (but it's owned by Oracle so I still worry in the back of my head that they'll fuck it up any day now). There's also Github Actions and Bitbucket Pipelines which I think are very similar in style, and also have free tiers. There's also the "Raspberry PI in a closet" option, which I might explore over the Christmas holidays. Dockerhub being free is something else I can't see lasting forever, their bandwidth costs must be immense? Although maybe they make enough from enterprise contracts to make up for it?

alexeldeib 6y ago
Have you seen https://www.docker.com/blog/scaling-docker-to-serve-millions-more-developers-network-egress/ https://www.docker.com/blog/scaling-docker-to-serve-millions... and https://www.docker.com/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-upcoming-docker-hub-rate-limiting/ https://www.docker.com/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-upco... ? And yes, paid accounts are exempt. But the costs are catching up.

fogfish 6y ago

Travis CI was good and easy to use for open source projects. However, reality is... GitHub actions is much easier solution for OSS.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

This may be a bit sudden. But instead of heaping scorn on them, I just feel grateful for the millions they must have invested in OSS. It's unlikely they are out to hurt anybody. I'd guess the vast majority of people there, now and in the past, would love to be able to continue doing so. So, if anyone can come up with the name for whoever bought them, a sale that was probably done with little alternatives already, then hate those peoples with all you got, got ahead[1]. But don't take it out on the people that helped you all those years. Not even if they screwed up the endgame by, maybe, being too optimistic for a week too long. [1]: But not too many death threats, maybe. Even just for purely selfish reasons, one wouldn't want commitments to OSS become a poison pill that makes any company providing such services toxic to investors.

alpb 6y ago
The original Travis CI GmbH, a German company, company is what the OSS community should be thankful for. They’ve been literally running build needs for at least half of GitHub. However; I don’t think anyone needs to be grateful for Idera Inc, an American company, which has done nothing so far but ruining Travis CI for the rest of the world but themselves. Thankfully the world has organically moved on to things like GitHub actions, but this personally will impact me as I have many repos out there that get 1 contrib/year, which would use maybe 2-3 minutes/yr. Lesson of the story here: There’s nothing such as free, even if there is, it will not last forever.
- fy20 6y ago
  > done nothing so far but ruining Travis CI for the rest of the world but themselves Don't forget the private equity firm and it's employees have a job to do as well - provide good returns on investments. That doesn't just benefit the wealthy, but if you have a pension fund (state or private) you are probably benefiting from it as well. > Lesson of the story here: There’s nothing such as free, even if there is, it will not last forever. In this economy, sadly no.
josteink 6y ago
> But instead of heaping scorn on them, I just feel grateful for the millions they must have invested in OSS. Agreed. They've done good stuff for OSS up until now, and they deserve credit for that. No need to feel bitter or entitled over something we've received 100% for free. But despite that, Travis-CI is not serving my (or other's) OSS needs right now, and people are obviously looking for alternatives. There's nothing wrong with that.

alien_ 6y ago

This is unfortunate and will cause a lot of migration work, and it was poorly communicated so I can understand the frustration but I'm thankful to Travis CI for their past services. My project only needs about 30m of build time monthly and the migration to something else may cost me a few hours of work. At my hourly rate that may be significant enough, so for a while I would rather pay a small monthly fee to cover my limited needs.

robinduckett 6y ago

Meh, do I really need continuous integration for my OSS project? Although inconvenient, it is possible to run these tests on my own computer before publishing.

greggman3 6y ago

When they had the previous announcement I switched my open source projects to GitHub actions. I get that some people will not want more GitHub but I figured given all the configuration is open and checked into your repo someone will eventually make an open source clone that can read the same configs . I also really like the way build scripts can be referenced by url/id such that I can just reference existing scripts made by other people. Super nice!

jrochkind1 6y ago
> I also really like the way build scripts can be referenced by url/id such that I can just reference existing scripts made by other people. Super nice! I'm not familiar with that feature, can you give a link to docs/example/more info?
- greggman3 6y ago
  See this example action, it just "uses" other scripts https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder docs https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#jobsjob_idstepsuses https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/refe...
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    Thanks! Still not sure what you mean about https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder I see the workflows at: https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/master/.github/workflows/lint.yml https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/... and https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/master/.github/workflows/test.yml https://github.com/samuelmeuli/action-electron-builder/blob/... What about them is using other scripts? Oh, do you jsut mean things like `uses: actions/setup-node@v1` is using that standard actions/setup-node "step"? Yeah, you can refrence steps defined elsewhere, ok, I get it! For some reason I was thinking you meant something else. OK, thanks!

wraptile 6y ago

Wasn't it kinda apparent that all of these 3rd party CI services will go the way of the dodo now that github actions and gitlabci exist? How could they compete with a platform built-in CI?

josteink 6y ago

Thanks! That was the final push I honestly needed. Now I've migrated my remaining 10+ Travis-CI builds to a different CI-provider (GitHub Actions). It feels like a solid upgrade.

tome 6y ago

If CI builds were defined in a programming language that provided clear semantics, abstraction and modularity then porting to a new build host would be 10x easier. It would be an "annoying" or "fiddly" level of work rather than a time sink costing hours and hours.

brodock 6y ago
considering how similar many CI providers are in terms of how you write your tests, I would say that this is either very achievable or not that worth it. you already can do a lot by writing a bunch of scripts that will be executed on a CI, and just fiddle with differences in like metadata/artifact/how you declare your containers. and while you are there, you can generate the code CI definitions for more than one CI provider (think of it like "multi-cloud" but for CI approach.
chubot 6y ago
Yup, that's where I want to take the Oil shell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25340456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25340456 Continuous builds are already written in YAML + shell. Platforms like Github Actions and Travis CI basically use YAML as a really bad syntax for shell scripts (with their own if statements!), and then embed more shell as strings. So Oil should basically generate JSON like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945449 and allow you to embed unevaluated (but parsed) literal shell blocks. So I'm adding the missing "declarative" part to shell. That alone gets you pretty far. Although there are some more language semantics that most builds need, like coarse-grained dependencies, ephemeral or persistent state, etc. gg is a related "multi cloud" system that's very interesting: https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg https://lobste.rs/s/virbxa/papers_i_love_gg I'm writing a blog post about this right now! ---- An improved shell is the natural language for this problem because shell is for gluing tasks together. It's the language of heterogeneity. I view Make as a form of shell with dependencies, and Make has already been parallelized and distributed by many systems going back many years.

totorovirus 6y ago

how much are they spending btw?

oxfordmale 6y ago

What a travisty...okay, I will go pack my bags.

kall 6y ago

A smart, or at least nice, move for github wpuld be to provide a one-click actions migration at least for the simple travis configs that the majority of projects use.

mhd 6y ago

Given the company's track record with ExtJS and Delphi, not surprising to me in the least.

akx 6y ago

On this note, I started a little project to convert Travis.yml workflows to GitHub Actions: https://akx.github.io/travis-to-github-actions/ https://akx.github.io/travis-to-github-actions/ Currently it deals with rudimentary Python and Node.js workflows, but contributions are naturally welcome.

hakre 6y ago
Looks nice, thanks for sharing. For the part to execute the run-script I'm currently going with a github-action itself: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml https://github.com/marketplace/actions/run-travis-yml it's based on the original travis-build so that utils like "travis_retry" are still available. each command in the asserted stages (e.g. before_install, install) directly breaks the build while the script runs through and gives the fail exit at the end (while showing the commands run and their result as on travis, asserted stages are with folding). might be a good addition to the online converter. the other parts of the workflow (vm setup, caches, services, matrix etc.) I find hard to port automatically. this needs much more insight and often is specific to the languages. and then it's "relatively easy". but an automatic mapping from the many languages travis supported looks overwhelming. perhaps better is to actually have the whole travis-build project as a github action (but I'm not fluent with ruby).

echopom 6y ago

Nothing surprising here. Travis CI made their exit few months ago with a Venture Firm , every venture firm use the same model of "Hibernation" to get cashflow from the platform without new investment. Only two option to do so : - increasing price - reducing cost Removing the "0$" price for Open Source Project is a disguised way to increase the price... It's likely the majority of the staff was laid off and the project is now hibernating living from acquired customers not adding new feature or change. Just being used as a source of Corporate Cash Flow.

nojvek 6y ago

Moving off TravisCI was a good decision. A couple of months back their support stopped responding even though we were paying TravisCI significant sums of money. Their service had all sorts of glitches and wasn’t very reliable. If they were walking away from people who wanted to give them money, I can imagine they don’t give a shit about OSS projects where they lose money. TravisCI taught me a hard lesson. Relying on 3rd party for CI is a losing bet if you care about reliability and guaranteed capacity.

gt565k 6y ago

I find it funny people are up in arms and complaining, out of all places, on HN, where start-up culture should be more prevalent and aware of the costs it takes to run a business and maintain its operational capacity. Nothing is free. It might be free to you, but Travis CI has to pay for the compute resources to run your free builds. At the end of the day, never build your product or infrastructure on free services without planning on eventually paying for it and budgeting for it. If you want a full CI/CD pipeline, there's plenty of open source tools. You can run it on your own hardware, which is what most do for builds as it's cheaper, or incorporate AWS spot instances if you want to run at the lowest cloud compute cost.