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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]

#101

Post by paranoidrobot »

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…

I'm hitting the same problem a lot with a bunch of things.

Concourse CI is the one I'm running up against this today - I'm taking over a partially built installation which has all sorts of hard-coded config environment variables that I'm trying to figure out their purpose.

Their documentation has basic getting-started stuff[1], but doesn't list all the config variables and their use. It's open source, so I cloned the repo, but they don't directly reference the environment variables there, either.

Compare that to, say, Ansible's documentation - it exhaustively lists all the options[2] and what they're used for, with links to other related documentation.

[1] https://concourse-ci.org/concourse-web.html [2] https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices...

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

#102

Post by dawnerd »

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…

My gripe with actions was the big refactor/change they made so all the old examples and apps which show up in search are wrong now.

There's also a lot of things you should be able to do but are not apparent or clear - and yeah the documentation is a disaster

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

#103

Post by vito »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #101
ComputerGuru wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm hitting the same problem a lot with a bunch of things. Concourse CI is the one I'm running up against this today - I'm taking over a partially built installation which has all sorts of hard-coded config environment variables that I'm trying to figure out their purpose. Their documentation has basic getting-started stuff[1], but doesn't list all the config variables and their use. It's open source, so I cloned the…

(Concourse co-creator/OSS lead here.)

Our CLI hasn't really aged well and that's something I'd like to address soon - probably going more in the direction of config files instead of flags/env vars. It'd be a lot easier to document with a proper schema. Thanks for the feedback and sorry the experience is still pretty rocky!

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

#104

Post by paranoidrobot »

vito wrote: post #103
paranoidrobot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hitting the same problem a lot with a bunch of things. Concourse CI is the one I'm running up against this today - I'm taking over a partially built installation which has all sorts of hard-coded config environment variables that I'm trying to figure out their purpose. Their documentation has basic getting-started stuff[1], but doesn't list all the config variables and their use. It's open source, so I cloned the…

(Concourse co-creator/OSS lead here.) Our CLI hasn't really aged well and that's something I'd like to address soon - probably going more in the direction of config files instead of flags/env vars. It'd be a lot easier to document with a proper schema. Thanks for the feedback and sorry the experience is still pretty rocky!

Awesome, thanks.

Honestly the whole application seems pretty good - but everything is focussed on more hello-world stuff, which is great for getting going on my machine - not so great for running it for real.

Whether you use environment vars or a config file, I don't mind - one benefit environment vars gives is that setting CONCOURSE_BIND_IP to the instance's IP is relatively simple, eg on AWS:

CONCOURSE_BIND_IP=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4)

If it's a config file then I need to update that before the application starts, which is more fiddling.

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

#105

Post by vito »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #104
vito wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Concourse co-creator/OSS lead here.) Our CLI hasn't really aged well and that's something I'd like to address soon - probably going more in the direction of config files instead of flags/env vars. It'd be a lot easier to document with a proper schema. Thanks for the feedback and sorry the experience is still pretty rocky!

Awesome, thanks. Honestly the whole application seems pretty good - but everything is focussed on more hello-world stuff, which is great for getting going on my machine - not so great for running it for real. Whether you use environment vars or a config file, I don't mind - one benefit environment vars gives is that setting CONCOURSE_BIND_IP to the instance's IP is relatively simple, eg on AWS: CONCOURSE_BIND_IP=$(cu…

Yeah that's a good point. There are definite trade-offs to going for only one or the other. If there's a nice way to support both without too much maintenance overhead, that'd be my preference. There are a few popular Go libraries which support that, like https://github.com/spf13/viper - which we'll probably consider switching to as part of a general CLI overhaul.

For a long time now we've been primarily focusing on the core design, concepts, and architecture at the expense of documentation and introductory material and outreach - we've never had a dedicated technical writer, so documentation is really best-effort. Now that the dust is settling on our roadmap I feel a lot more confident in increasing our focus on onboarding, operability, and developer/user experience in this coming year. :)

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

#106

Post by pyr0hu »

I really liked GitHub's pipeline description file, but my issue with GH Actions was that the pipeline was slow. The same job running on the cheapest/slowest free-tier available Semaphore runner took half the time than on GitHub. That's with caching, parallelization on GH too.

Otherwise it could be a good product, and I'd really like if I could manage the repos and the CI from one unified place

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

ethomson wrote: post #94
SahAssar wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've converted our teams CI/CD to use github actions (from mostly running on AWS) at a large company since early in the beta, but we have also run into a lot of issues. Where can I report these issues and get a real answer? I don't mind getting told that a certain feature is on the backburner, I just want to know that someone has considered it.

The best place to report issues or request features is https://github.community/ . The Product and Support teams both visit that regularly.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by petrikapu »

ethomson wrote: post #96
penagwin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Product Manager for GitHub Actions here. You can self-host the GitHub Actions runners. This means that you can run CI/CD workflows on your own hardware, while your source code is hosted on github.com itself. https://help.github.com/en/actions/automating-your-workflow-...

Can you give some insight when shared self-hosted for private repos are available? It was super easy to setup for single project. I’d like to share beefy AWS instance for few more private repos. Keep on good work!

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

#109

Post by engineeroncall »

While it’s not perfect, GitHub Actions was pretty straightforward to set up for an open source iOS project I help manage[0].

Most of the actions were pre-existing Makefile targets used during the bootstrap process anyway, so the YAML config was fairly lightweight.

Echoing the other comments in the thread, the docs did feel a bit sparse when I last poked around (this was back when Actions was still in beta).

[0] https://github.com/birdrides/mockingbird

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

#110

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Sounds a bit harsh. I managed to get a simple gradle build going a few weeks ago with very little work. I say, simple, but it actually uses docker compose to spin up Elasticsearch to run some integration tests (using the gradle docker compose plugin). This was shockingly easy and required no extra work since their ubuntu context already has that pre-installed. So, use ubuntu, checkout code, add Java, configure some caching (optional, but it helps), run build: https://github.com/jillesvangurp/es-kotlin-wrapper-client/bl...

Given that you are using maven, which can be a bit fiddly, might it be the case that some of your issues are with your build? E.g. the way maven deploy works is very dependent on how you set up the pom file.

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