A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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IMO, Gitlab CI/CD blows Github out of the water. They're not even in the same league. I recommend Gitlab + self hosted runners (it's so easy).
I've been using Gitlab for many years and host my own runners as of the past 6 months because I nearly exhausted my monthly free tier runner minutes one month.
I second GitLab CI/CD - it's a CI/CD system that just makes sense to me. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its complexities depending on your needs, but I've overall enjoyed my time working with it.
I had someone swear to me that Github templating was better, but I've only worked with Gitlabs templates. Why do you like Gitlab over Github?
Gitlab CI feels native. Github offers similar functionality but it feels/looks like an afterthought. I think the Gitlab .yaml structure is more intuitive. Also, how the Gitlab UI visually represents a pipeline is mcuh better, IMO. Self hosting runners on my server (Ubuntu) is so easy and free. I hadn't tried it with Github but it sounds like it still costs money?!
Note: I don't work for Gitlab
Forgejo has their own runner: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/actions/runner-installation/
I've used it on my personal machine, was very easy to setup and mostly compatible with GitHub actions out-of-the-box (including things like actions/checkout@v4).
Forgejo runners are great! I found some simple actions to do docker in docker and now build all my images with them!
I'm using gitea which has CI compatible to GitHub actions with my own runner. It's pretty straightforward to set up and didn't give me any headaches yet. It's a very small instance just for my ownaybe dozen projects though.
This is what I was using till I switched to forgejo and never got around to setting up one of their runners.
If it helps motivate you to give it a shot, I found gitea's runner very confusing to set up, but I felt like forgejo was better designed, pretty easy and well documented.
heck yeah this is the review i was looking for 💯
good lead. it’s just the one project for now, and to my surprise it’s actually a dependency for the ollama-rs project, so i feel somewhat obligated to keep it stable.
CI compatible to GitHub actions
Ugh. More yaml?
I get the hate but did you ever have to maintain jenkins pipelines? I'll take yaml any day.
I'm game to explore the next evolution though.
Forgejo and self hosted action workers.
Watching this thread because CI/CD is something that I'd like to get into.
Ditto
Gitlab CI/CD pipelines are my go-to tool. At work we self host an instance, for personal projects I use gitlab.com.
Please don’t take me as a GH shill because I’m not. I’m not sure we read the same email given your projects. Actions on GH runners are dropping in cost and there’s a new fractional cost for self-hosted. For the average user, especially those on GH runners, costs are going down. Looking at your repo, you haven’t run anything since July. Your workflow files use GH runners. Nothing in your history suggests you’re leaving the free tier so I don’t get this FUD at all. General Microsoft hate? Fuck yeah. Shitty GH service? Fuck yeah. Plenty of reasons to dunk but this was not one of them. M
Magnetic needle. Steady hand.
Jenkins is good enough to be widely used enough to be hated enough to be downvoted.
The sign of a mature product IMO.
You could do worse than Jenkins
Been using Jenkins since before it was called Jenkins. It's been in use at every corpo I've worked for. It can practically do anything. Especially coupled with Docker.
Hudson? Man, that's a blast from the past.
I’m not entirely sure why all the hate : Jenkins can do the most things the must ways. And yes, it’s so much nicer defining a pipeline with a fully functional language than an assortment of yaml files
Actually that was my response when my company wanted to start using Gitlab ci. It only has one way of doing things so you can probably get a faster start if you had no ci, were a small company, and had simple builds. However we’re over 4,000 builds in many languages from 12 year old monoliths to modern micro services and containers….. and way too much godawful JavaScript. Do you want the quick and simple tool great for a small startup or the all powerful kitchen sink of tools?
fwiw, you can self host a GitHub actions runner
Don't they want to monetize those as well?
yes, according to this morning’s email
ah right, my bad
But you are charged for it.
So many these days. Actions are probably one of the best, but there are still plenty of others out there.
If I were to pick one, it would probably be dagger. Or really anything but Jenkins.
we use Jenkins + a bespoke wrapper at work. thats left a bad taste in my mouth enough to avoid Jenkins altogether
I do devops at work and my experience is that really any CI/CD system works, they all have enough features to do what you want. They all fundamentally just run scripts on boxes. Therefore, I say pick the easiest one, likely the one that is built into whatever Git system you are using.
Try to keep your pipelines simple-ish when you can, they almost never need to be that complicated. 95% of the time it's just running a command or two. If a pipeline needs to do something complex, I'd recommend writing that script into the Git repo and calling it, rather than having a CI job that is 100 lines long.
We use Azure Devops at my current gig. It works pretty well for our setup. I've used GHA before; it definitely didn't "spark joy". I ~~wasted~~spent way too many hours in the "update yaml file, commit, push, wait 5 minutes for it to fail again" ~~spiral of despair~~feedback loop.
Nice thing with ADO is its release dashboard -- you get a really nice summary of recent builds and where they went:
$project - dev - test - prod
I didn't see anything similar for GHA.
Are you sure it was a price "increase"?
I got a similar email this morning but it was the exact opposite of what I expected upon closer examination:
https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing
you’re right. i just expected it to be an increase 😅
Used to use travis or clicleci and they both worked really well. Theres some issues with travis being old/expensive and circle got in touble for a few security issues though. gitlab has some nice tools from my experience.
Im interested as well. Ive got a forgjo that I would love to hook into at some point.
Git lab CI is my goto for git repo based things (unit tests, integration tests, etc). Fleet through Rancher for real deployments (manages and maintains state because kubernetes). Tekton is my in between catchall.
I self-host https://woodpecker-ci.org/ and I love it. It was easy to set up, and I never have to worry about CI/CD minutes.
Self-hosted Forgejo Actions on a Codeberg repository. It was relatively easy to setup and I don't even need a VPS through my dynamic IP 5G connexion. See also: https://codeberg.org/trougnouf/cfait
I'm currently looking into Concourse.
It does have steeper-than-average learning curve, but I really like that it has well-defined fundamentals (resources, jobs, tasks) and isolation with OCI containers. Before I adopt it fully, I want it to run my nix flake dev shell.
btw, the prices of managed runners are going down, not increasing
https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing#standard-github-hosted-runners
still good to have a self-hosted alternative though
i honestly didn’t look that close, obviously haha
but yeah, i’ve been kinda looking for a reason to de-Microsoft my stuff
I use cake build to create the build script and then I can run it from wherever.
Where's the Bazel people at?