After some of the previous TOS changes, I finally found the motivation to move to a self-hosted CI on a VPS. I’ve been entirely satisfied since migrating, and it’s been a truly low touch experience. Not for everyone I’m sure but for the low cost of the VPS I’m getting my value out of it, certainly not proving to be a maintenance drain as I’d feared, just updating it on a CRON has served me well.
Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
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Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#12> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.
Well, their lowest paid tier is $69/month. I dunno about you, but that's way more than I can justify spending to be able to support doing work for free. If they had a $50/year or so plan that just restored the previous open source plan, I'd be more willing to consider something like that, but >$800 a year puts it firmly out of my price bracket for what it offers me.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#13> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.
This. If I had a cloud hosted CI tool, I would gladly allow open source projects to use it. But they would be lowest priority and there would be limitations on how often builds could happen and/or volume of contributions. Large corporate backed opensource projects should absolutely be paying for tools like Travis CI. Just because it's open source doesn't mean there isn't money floating around. It's not super hard to…
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Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#14I've been using Travis on a bunch of my opensource projects and was wondering why builds were getting queued for ~a day before they'd run, I guess I got my answer. :/ I don't really want to lock myself into GH actions (ideally, I wouldn't be on GH at all), does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying some money, but the almost $1K/year for Travis' lowest tier is about an order of magnitude m…
Have you looked into CircleCI?
I've used it in the past, but when they finally killed off the 1.0 builders (?) my company went to an "internally" hosted Jenkins[1] server and I haven't played with any of the 2.0 stuff. Have you? How do you find working with it?
[1] I did also ask about selfhosted stuff, but I'm not willing to host Jenkins for myself. I've heard nothing but complaints about managing a Jenkins install. It's been fine as a user (if a bit confusing), but I really don't want to admin it.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#15Hey Jeff, This is hitting me hard, too. I hope this is the right moment for me to pipe up and say this: I always just do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run. I am grateful for the free minutes they offer open source projects - but any of the deeper integrations, the advanced automation? No, thanks. It's not like the other developers who use what I write have any more motivation than I…
I don’t think either of them really “benefit from the advanced features” any more than any other language. Also, both have builds that are generally more cross platform than a shell script, given that they’re native on all platforms, and shell is not.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#16Hey Jeff, This is hitting me hard, too. I hope this is the right moment for me to pipe up and say this: I always just do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run. I am grateful for the free minutes they offer open source projects - but any of the deeper integrations, the advanced automation? No, thanks. It's not like the other developers who use what I write have any more motivation than I…
>do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run
This. 100%. Where I'm working is migrating from Bamboo to Jenkins. For my team the new process is just calling "./build-test $params" while others are stuck re-implementing various stages, tasks and blah blah blah. Also an added bonus to this is having the full history of changes to the CI/CD process tracked in git.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#17Pretty much any time there's an acquisition of a company, followed by a firing of a significant fraction of the engineering staff, one should run away from it. Sucks though for Travis CI users, I used it in the past and it worked well.
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Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#18I've been using Travis on a bunch of my opensource projects and was wondering why builds were getting queued for ~a day before they'd run, I guess I got my answer. :/ I don't really want to lock myself into GH actions (ideally, I wouldn't be on GH at all), does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying some money, but the almost $1K/year for Travis' lowest tier is about an order of magnitude m…
Github Actions really is a freakin awesome product. Yeah, there's lock-in, but their free plan (and cheap Pro plan for individuals) offers a great value. And, really, CI is CI; if you ever need to migrate, even for this guy with hundreds of projects it should only take a couple days. Once you've seen one CI yaml file, you get the gist of what all of them do.
Other options:
* Gitlab CI. Good value, great integration with Gitlab, has integration with Github.
* CircleCI. Something of a gold standard in CIaaS among growing companies. But, it goes down a lot, and the new UI isn't an improvement. But, it works and its a good value. Word of advice, I'd avoid using their "Orbs" if I were you. You can accumulate a lot of lock-in with those, and they're infamous for stability issues. Instead, use their docker builder and just build a base docker image with all the stuff you need installed.
* Buildkite. Really cool product; they handle the control plane and the UI and webhooks, you host the runners. Its a simple binary or docker image you can install anywhere. If you're looking for something with low lock-in that's still easy to manage, Buildkite is a great option. I'll warn you though: if you're going to do any kind of cloud hosting for your runners, and you want to build docker images, best to avoid their dockerized runners. Just install natively on a linux box, either manually, with an AMI, etc. Docker-in-Docker sucks; not impossible to get working, but not worth your time.
* Jenkins/JenkinsX. If you want something with zero lockin but also hard to manage.
* AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline/CodeDeploy. There is, like, no one I feel comfortable recommending these options to, but people still use them because they're AWS.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#19Oh boy, I just moved my projects from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com after the builds stopped happening on .org.
(Despite the travis FAQ that said "we’re making a number of changes to the travis-ci.org infrastructure to ensure the service will remain as reliable and available to you as it always has been until [it goes away Dec 31]", that was not the case, builds simply stopped working on .org. https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-reposito...)
I actually had not seen that announcement at all, this is the first I'm seeing it. So I'm in the same position as OP, I maybe should not have spent time migrating my projects to travis-ci.com. Although I guess this buys me a bit of time to move to github actions instead.
Travis is the reason that many people DO CI at all, in my experience. They made it so easy -- and free for open source -- that there was no reason NOT to do it. Then once you see the value of it, you are hooked, you can't do without it. But I think the number of projects doing CI (open source and not) skyrocketed because of travis. Prior to travis's entry on the scene, CI was not nearly as universal as it is now.
So to say that offering free CI to open source is "unsustainable".... I dunno, they managed to do it for 9 years, were they losing money the whole time?
I think the free service for open source literally created the market. Or expanded it exponentially. It was the first exposure a lot of people had to CI, and they took that first step because it was so easy and free.
And now we're hooked. If there weren't other free alternatives like Github Actions, I don't know what open source would do... we all know we can't develop this stuff without CI, but so many open source projects simply don't have a budget for it.
Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works
#20I had to change CI many times.
From jenkins to gitlab... From travis to github actions...
So I build this small project that helps me to change faster without touch in real CI logic.
https://github.com/rosineygp/mkdkr
I think your problem is bigger than mine, but this kind of approach can help you in the future.