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The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

twitchard.github.io

41–50 of 275 posts

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#41

The kubernetes plug-in for Jenkins works well for us, and as the checkout/clone happens in the pod you don’t have the workspace bind mount problem. We are using docker-in-docker at the moment but looking at buildah. We do parallel windows container builds as well. Jenkins is a bit like Perl IMO: there are ways to use it that avoid the majority of its sharp edges (eg putting logic in bash and just call bash, avoid gro…

The biggest issue I have with the plugin is the container takes a significant amount of resources to run.

I don't know how that compares to other solutions like github though. Being able to run a really lightweight container in argowf has its advantages

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#42
post #20

Jenkins is not perfect by any means, but I can say it is much better than existing solutions (taking pros and cons after trying and using many of them). Sure, it doesn't have fancy UI or flying buttons, nor is it rust/PWA/react/whatever-rage-is-these-days, but it does its job - it works, is free, and has been very well-maintained for ages. Download a single file and run it. Want to extend it? There is a plugin for ev…

> I see them as a car drive shaft ...

That's a good metaphor, and it's significant that there are large innovations happening in car drive shafts as with CI tools:

https://electrek.co/2023/11/29/hyundai-kia-introduce-new-uni...

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#43
post #13
post #2

Avoid Jenkins, and if you can, try https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity "TeamCity Professional is free – even for commercial use – and has no limitations on features, number of users, or build time. It allows you to configure up to 100 builds and run up to 3 builds in parallel, which is more than enough for most projects"

> TeamCity Professional is free – even for commercial use – and has no limitations on features, number of users, or build time. Yeah, no. There's obviously gonna be a catch in the future.

The catch is your limited to a small number of parallel builds (3). Our CI pipeline would take hours to run with that limitation

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#44
post #35

Jenkins is rock solid. Been using it for three years to deliver highly critical software. The development experience is the worst of all ci tools since no one wants to setup jenkinspipelineunit to test the pipelines. Dagger might be the salvation here, but even that tool didn't support Jenkins out of the gate. And for those that are reading this, the statement about pipeline groovy being a trap is exactly right. Avoi…

Oh ye keep it simple. I worked as a Jenkins admin for half a year and one day I woke up from a nightmare and realized that I've made some sort of parallelization batch job processor communicating via outputting bat-files, in Groovy, to cut down build times.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#45
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For the time being" is an understatement. The company has been around for 20+ years, and while I haven't used TeamCity, if it is anything like their other products, you can be certain it is built with a high level of attention to detail and that that won't change anytime soon. It is one of the few companies left I license stuff from.

It is a capitalist enterprise, which means control by its very owners is contingent on making enough profit to pay the bills, in the very best of cases. This is not my opinion.

Yeah, but this is JetBrains. They are one of the few companies whose products are so much better than anyone else’s that I’d pay for them, even as an independent developer. They’ve been around for decades and are still more than popular enough that making money shouldn’t be their issue. My company of 80,000+ employees has a JetBrains license for every developer.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#46
post #2

Avoid Jenkins, and if you can, try https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity "TeamCity Professional is free – even for commercial use – and has no limitations on features, number of users, or build time. It allows you to configure up to 100 builds and run up to 3 builds in parallel, which is more than enough for most projects"

>configure up to 100 builds and run up to 3 builds in parallel

Funnily enough, Jenkins does not have that limitation.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetbrains is among the very few companies I’ll trust for the time being

Same here. Although I am super nervous that they will either cash out by going public or selling to some investor. That will be the end of it.

Always praying that they never will. I’ve been using their products since my first “real” developer job over 12 years ago and I never want to switch.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#49
post #20

Jenkins is not perfect by any means, but I can say it is much better than existing solutions (taking pros and cons after trying and using many of them). Sure, it doesn't have fancy UI or flying buttons, nor is it rust/PWA/react/whatever-rage-is-these-days, but it does its job - it works, is free, and has been very well-maintained for ages. Download a single file and run it. Want to extend it? There is a plugin for ev…

I hear you, I want my CI to be boring and just work, and using something old and and a little cooky is fine but...

omg switching away from jenkins (in our case to gitlab CI) was a revalation. SO much easier to use. There were a ton of things we were avoiding doing in CI (or at all) that we started doing (easily) once we switched.

> it must work properly, and I don't expect it to be pretty

Too often it really _didn't_ work properly, or the gap between where we were and "working properly" was a mysterious foggy ocean with no clear path.

To be fair, we drove it pretty hard, we had some jobs that ran thousands of tests on big clusters of nodes to validate and deploy huge ETL pipelines, but man it was nice to have that work smoothly with a nice UI that made sense with super-well-documented pipline commands. It did _basically_ work with jenkins, but the experience of troubleshooting problems and adding new features was a constant pain point that really dragged out a lot of work.

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