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GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

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Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#81

Post by wasyl »

penagwin wrote: post #65
bravura wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's VERY difficult for me to get anything that costs money approved regardless of price For me, this is a big red flag.

I should probably emphasize that it's difficult for me to get new things approved, but if we NEED it then money is not a problem. The response I get is we don't _NEED_ a CI/CD (and haven't had one for years), so they would rather I find a solution that can run on our hardware for free. I'll add that I enjoy my work environment and they treat me very well, I'm young and I'm known to "like shiny new things". I also hav…

For a free, self-hosted CI I strongly recommend TeamCity -- if you can get away with 3 build agents and 100 configurations that come with the free version.

I was in your boots some time ago, managing CI before I convinced the company that paying for a hosted CI is cheaper than me maintaining our self-hosted whatever CI we were trying at that point :) Jenkins was atrocious and I spent ungodly amount of time dealing with all kinds of issues, while TeamCity was mostly configure-and-forget. Initial setup is pretty straightforward, so is later migration to a real database for example. Updates are seamless and we had some projects on it even after we started using paid CI (Bitrise), because there was no motivation to migrate as everything was running smoothly.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#82

Post by cheesedoodle »

ccleve wrote: post #13

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work. Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each…

I agree! I'm trying to migrate an OSS project from circleci to GitHub Actions but fail configure probably one of the most common actions there is: build a (cmake/c++) project inside a custom docker image. There should be a an clear and concise example of this. Even a migration example would actually be expected if GitHub wants to quickly convert users from X service to their CI.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#83

Post by lioeters »

pavlov wrote: post #39

I'd be hesitant to build on GitHub tools that have overlap with anything Microsoft provides. When something similar is introduced to Azure, why keep the subsidiary's internal competition around? This happened already with VS Code vs. Github's Atom editor whose development has ceased earlier this year. (Not that I ever was a huge fan of Atom, but its discontinuation is a direct result of the Microsoft acquisition.)

> Github's Atom editor whose development has ceased earlier this year

It doesn't seem like they've ceased development on Atom - the latest version release was just 3 days ago? https://github.com/atom/atom/releases

---

I've started learning GitHub Actions, at first just for simple build/deploy script, but hope to make more extensive use of the feature.

I did consider how it overlaps with Microsoft's other business areas, and I came to the conclusion that they probably wouldn't be investing resources into this, just to sunset it anytime soon. (I'm sure there are historical examples though, like some Google products..)

In the end, I do somewhat share your hesitation, and believe it's a good idea to always be ready to migrate the essentials. For GitHub Actions, I suppose that means having most of the functionality written in generic scripts.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#85

Post by xtracto »

ccleve wrote: post #13

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work. Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each…

I did not get very far... I use Gitlab for personal projects and love their CI/CD process ... In my company we are using Github and were excited to start using these tools for CI/CD. But when I tried to do a simple CI action that took the code in the repo and ran npm install && npm test (simple .gitlab_ci.yml on gitlab) I could not find heads or tails on how to do it... wasn't clear if it was possible with Actions or if I need a third party like CircleCi or aws or what...

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#86

Post by kmf »

karaokeyoga wrote: post #84

Outstanding video ... beginner-friendly, great signal-to-noise ratio, succinct, excellent visuals and a clear voice.

hey, thank you so much! I’m super proud of it, been trying to improve every aspect of my vids from scripting/storyboarding, recording, editing, etc - I think it all really came together well here!

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#87

Post by xtracto »

penagwin wrote: post #8
pm90 wrote: post #5

I would hesitate to build on anything that relies on GitHub native tooling. GitHub support is absolutely the worst. Their tools fail in weird ways at times, and without support you will be stuck. For personal/non production apps, fine. But beware of using it as a core part of your infrastructure.

Thanks for the warning, are there any good tools that integrate with pull request checks that can be self hosted? We self host nearly everything at work except for github. (And it's VERY difficult for me to get anything that costs money approved regardless of price)

I echo the Gitlab recommendation. Setting up CI/CD pipelines is beautifull, easy and all code-backed. And you can self hist it.

Really. Having one repo checked out into a docker container with a specific node version toolchain and running your test suite with code coverage + publishing html reporting is a matter of a .gitlab_ci.yml config file with 6 to 10 lines .

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#88

Post by xtracto »

kwhat4 wrote: post #18
kureikain wrote: post #14

Github actions is nice but I think they go to wrong direction. The way they work is you are given an image then you have to use a thing call Github action, which basically just to extract out into YAML to define a certain steps for install any dependencies, execute shell script ... I don't know why they didn't allow us to use any docker image we want so we don't have to waste time to use actions to install dependenci…

> I don't know why they didn't allow us to use any docker image we want Can you imagine allowing anyone on the internet to run an arbitrary container on your server for free?

Confirming that most other Ci services allow you to do that. I have done it in Gitlab for the Ci/CD of my Ionic apps.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#89

Post by BurningFrog »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #20
ccleve wrote: post #13

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work. Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each…

I am with you on this. It seems to be a new trend: “show users how to do a hello world” which was disregarded in the past... but somehow that turned into “instead of providing real documentation” rather than “in addition to.” It’s not just GitHub. There’s a language I (and the rest of HN) love that has adopted “story format” for documentation but is missing real, hard technical documentation apart from method-level c…

Being fairly new to Python the "story format" of the documentation is one of the most frustrating things.

"This package is really good. Here is an example. This feature is cool! This other feature solves a common problem. Here is a list of some of the functions."

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#90

Post by [deleted] »

ethomson wrote: post #68
ccleve wrote: post #13

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work. Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each…

Product Manager for GitHub Actions here. Sorry that this was difficult for you - we're continuing to work on our documentation for both GitHub Actions and Github Packages (and how to use them together) and we'll make sure that we improve this. For my Java project, I set up GitHub Packages as a server in my settings.xml, and then use: mvn deploy -Dgithub.username=${{github.actor}} -Dgithub.password=${{github.token}} -…

[deleted]
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