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Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

devopsdirective.com

31–40 of 46 posts

Re: Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

#32
post #16

The "Holiday Reminder" could actually send a somewhat puzzling notification about you needing to check out the GitHub pipeline for a production failure. I would for sure forget about even setting it up and would shit my pants on New Year's Eve... and then have a good laugh on myself.

Haha, good point... I have another 5 months to fully forget that I ever set this up. The name of the action does get included in the email notification so hopefully I'll be able to decypher it, even after some NYE celebration champagne!

You could set up a weekly failing job that reminds you ;)

Re: Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

#33
post #23

For anybody interested in playing around with and hacking on different CI / devops stuff I recently launched https://boxci.dev , which is a distributed CI service where the builds run on your own hardware, via a lightweight runner that just does coordination and runs build shell commands on bare metal, so it's a bit more hackable / flexible than (for instance) GH actions / Gitlab CI. It's free to sign up and play aro…

neat. Looks similar to https://buildkite.com .

Yep! We've been doing this at Buildkite for six years now. We're lucky to have a lot of fantastic customers who have helped us learn over the years what makes a great hybrid SaaS/self-hosted CI solution.

Re: Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

#34

For anybody interested in playing around with and hacking on different CI / devops stuff I recently launched https://boxci.dev , which is a distributed CI service where the builds run on your own hardware, via a lightweight runner that just does coordination and runs build shell commands on bare metal, so it's a bit more hackable / flexible than (for instance) GH actions / Gitlab CI. It's free to sign up and play aro…

This looks awesome.

As someone who's a bit newer to CI/CD, this solution would be ideal if you don't want to host Jenkins yourself right?

I just give you access to my GitHub repos, install the agent then whenever I commit something into GitHub, the agent will see this and perform the task/pipeline right?

Similarly to how Jenkins works, except I don't need to install Jenkins - I just install the agent instead.

Re: Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

#36
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also loaded very quickly for me. Static sites FTW!

...and its hosted on an f1-micro instance! ( https://devopsdirective.com/posts/2020/03/load-testing-f1-mi... ) Almost all of the load is handled by CloudFlare though.

Just curious - why didn't you decide to serve the site from object storage?

Re: Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

#37
post #34

For anybody interested in playing around with and hacking on different CI / devops stuff I recently launched https://boxci.dev , which is a distributed CI service where the builds run on your own hardware, via a lightweight runner that just does coordination and runs build shell commands on bare metal, so it's a bit more hackable / flexible than (for instance) GH actions / Gitlab CI. It's free to sign up and play aro…

This looks awesome. As someone who's a bit newer to CI/CD, this solution would be ideal if you don't want to host Jenkins yourself right? I just give you access to my GitHub repos, install the agent then whenever I commit something into GitHub, the agent will see this and perform the task/pipeline right? Similarly to how Jenkins works, except I don't need to install Jenkins - I just install the agent instead.

Exactly right!

And just to emphasise, even the agents are totally ephemeral and don't require much management effort on your side - you can install and spin them up/down on any machine at any time just through shell commands and the service automatically manages this agent pool and sends builds to it - no manual steps at all. If no agents are running, builds just sit in a queue.

If you'd be interested in playing around with it and have any questions, please feel free to email me (email's in my profile).

Re: Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

#38
Unlike the authoer, I haven't found Github Actions very intuitive to work with :)

I've asked this before on a similar post, maybe someone here knows. Has anyone managed to get a Pre-Release to track Master using Github Actions? I can't seem to find a working example that does this (and I can't seem to cobble one together myself)

There are a few things that are seemingly intentionally left out of GitHub Actions... like you can create new Releases on a push, but there is no direct way to delete/update a release with fresh builds.

I know you can just get build artifacts - but those are not publicly available and hard to link people to.

Re: Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

#40
post #36
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and its hosted on an f1-micro instance! ( https://devopsdirective.com/posts/2020/03/load-testing-f1-mi... ) Almost all of the load is handled by CloudFlare though.

Just curious - why didn't you decide to serve the site from object storage?

Mostly because I knew I wanted to play around with trying out different configurations, testing performance, etc...

If I didn't have those secondary goals, I would have either:

1) Hosted on Netlify

OR

2) Hosted in an S3 / GCS bucket

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