Comment by tacker2000

5 days ago

These online / paid CI systems are a dime a dozen and who knows what will happen to them in the future…

Im still rocking my good old jenkins machine, which to be fair took me a long time to set up, but has been rock solid ever since and will never cost me much and will never be shut down.

But i can definitely see the appeal of github actions, etc…

+1 for Jenkins.

At $dayjob they recently set up git runners. The effort I’m currently working on has the OS dictated to us, long story don’t ask. The OS is centos 7.

The runners do not support this. There is an effort to move to Ubuntu 22.04. The runners also don’t support this.

I’m setting up a Jenkins instance.

until you have to debug a GH action, especially if it only runs on main or is one of the handful of tasks that are only picked up when committed to main.

god help you, and don’t even bother with the local emulators / mocks.

  • But debugging Jenkins jobs is absolute pain too, in varying ways depending on how the job was defined (clicking through the ui, henerated by something, groovy, pipelines, etc).

    • Yea, thats really a pain and could be improved.

      Are there any Jenkins Gurus out there who can give some tips?

  • I've had a great experience using `act` to debug github actions containers. I guess your mileage, as usual, will vary depending on what you are doing in CI.

    • i tried act a couple years ago and ran into a lot of issues when running actions that have external dependencies

  • What are the good local emulators for gh actions? The #1 reason we don’t use them is because the development loop is appallingly slow.

    • nektos/act was considered good enough to be adopted as the CI solution for Gitea and Forgejo. The latter uses it for all their development, seems to work out fine for them.

      I've never been a fan of GitHub Actions (too locked-in/proprietary for my taste), so no idea if it lives up to expectations.