hey nerds! i got a lovely email from GitHub this morning that their increasingly vibe-coded, barely-working Actions features are about to get more expensive (charging by the minute for something that notoriously spin-locks is a special flavor of shit sandwich).
i usually just use whatever i’m given at wherever i’m working. i do have a project that i maintain to parse Ollama Modelfiles tho: https://github.com/covercash2/modelfile and to be honest, Actions is the only solution i’ve ever used that came close to sparking joy, simply because it was easy to use and had tons of community mind-share (i’ve definitely heard horror stories and would never stake my business on it), but this price increase and all the other news around GitHub lately has got me side-eying self-hosting solutions for my git projects. Forgejo seems like the way to go for git hosting, but Actions in particular Just Works™️ for me, so i’m kind of dreading setting something up that will be yet another time sink/rabbit hole (just in time for the holidays! 🙃).
i can install most of my tooling with my language toolchain (read: rustup and cargo) which makes things fairly neat, but i just don’t have a sense for what people use outside of Jenkins and Actions.
i thought this community might have some insight beyond the LLM generated listicles that have blighted modern search results.
thanks in advance 🙏
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
wastedspent way too many hours in the “update yaml file, commit, push, wait 5 minutes for it to fail again”spiral of despairfeedback 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.
A lot of that pain can be reduced by writing and running your code locally before pushing it to a CI environment. Generally with our automation we write a CLI, And GitHub actions is just an execution environment that calls the CLI.
And if what you’re trying to do must execute inside an action. You can run workflows locally with docker!
That’s a great idea if it’s possible, but I want to say it wouldn’t have helped with our environment at the time.
I almost wish I could look back at that repo and share the yaml file here, maybe I was missing something back then. I’m certainly more proficient with yaml now.
I do recall wishing there was a way to simulate the execution locally. I think I remember hearing about a local runner, but it had too many caveats to help.