Jenkins Is Getting Old • Hacker News Board

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#171

Post by bsder » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #138

badloginagain wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab CI is pretty good. I hate, on a fundamental level this whole "bash in YAML" trend. Let's take a powerful, turing complete language and put it in a _config file_. What? I don't even... And the fact that you only get _one_ .gitlab-ci.yml file. That is legitimate madness. Want modularized CI/CD configuration? Not in these parts, buster. Have submodule build dependencies? We laugh at your use case. Sure as shit be…

> I hate, on a fundamental level this whole "bash in YAML" trend. This is why I hate Ansible. Looks simple until you need to do something complex, and then it becomes horrible. Chef's use of an actual language is far better, though on the flip side it's much harder to provide any kind of interface to configure it outside of a text editor. If only there were some language where config data and code were the same data…

I really don't understand why people are so reluctant to use Tcl for these kinds of things.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#172

Post by sisu2019 » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

Normally I have no issues getting things to work but I bounced off trying to get modern Jenkins to build a github gradle project three times now. I even used to have one, way back, that built maven projects from SVN and deployed into artifactory but I can't seem to manage the same now. I thought it was me but maybe jenkins just became really awful in the meantime.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#173

Post by lacion » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #138

badloginagain wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab CI is pretty good. I hate, on a fundamental level this whole "bash in YAML" trend. Let's take a powerful, turing complete language and put it in a _config file_. What? I don't even... And the fact that you only get _one_ .gitlab-ci.yml file. That is legitimate madness. Want modularized CI/CD configuration? Not in these parts, buster. Have submodule build dependencies? We laugh at your use case. Sure as shit be…

> I hate, on a fundamental level this whole "bash in YAML" trend. This is why I hate Ansible. Looks simple until you need to do something complex, and then it becomes horrible. Chef's use of an actual language is far better, though on the flip side it's much harder to provide any kind of interface to configure it outside of a text editor. If only there were some language where config data and code were the same data…

you can write python plugins and modules to extend functionality, there is no need to just start running commands everywhere.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#174

Post by bcoughlan » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:37 PM UTC

I spent quite a while grappling with Jenkins pipelines, and while it definitely has its warts, once you get over the hump and get one pipeline the way you want it, it's quite easy to use it as a starter for other projects.

Personally I go to great lengths to minimise the plugin dependencies and push the logic into bash scripts or Maven/Gradle. The Jenkinsfile just calls the bash scripts, so I can run it before I change it. Where I use plugins in the pipeline I document what they are and what they do in case we ever need to go from scratch.

It is hard to test but the linter picks up quite a lot of errors before push, and if you're doing a multi-branch pipeline you can just test your changes by pushing to your own branch. It's a long cycle, but the variation should go down the more you have them.

It has also been indispensable as an ad-hoc task scheduler. For example, I have a job that cleans up old branch artifacts every Saturday night. It was easy to alert on failures and see the results and history of past runs. I don't know anything else that would have fit the bill.

When you make software over 10 years old in such a fast-changing environment, the legacy of the software can weigh you down. I've worked on similar products that were tied to their legacy counterparts (sharing a database), and every change meant carrying the baggage of backwards compatibility with the legacy platform. If I could do it all again, I'd have done it the Basecamp way: Get a clean break from the legacy version, and have a migration path to the new system.

I would like to see CloudBees take all they've learned over the years, take the great work they've done on Blue Ocean and their core job scheduling system and put it all together without carrying the history with it.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#175

Post by madjam002 » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #138

badloginagain wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab CI is pretty good. I hate, on a fundamental level this whole "bash in YAML" trend. Let's take a powerful, turing complete language and put it in a _config file_. What? I don't even... And the fact that you only get _one_ .gitlab-ci.yml file. That is legitimate madness. Want modularized CI/CD configuration? Not in these parts, buster. Have submodule build dependencies? We laugh at your use case. Sure as shit be…

> I hate, on a fundamental level this whole "bash in YAML" trend. This is why I hate Ansible. Looks simple until you need to do something complex, and then it becomes horrible. Chef's use of an actual language is far better, though on the flip side it's much harder to provide any kind of interface to configure it outside of a text editor. If only there were some language where config data and code were the same data…

So... Nix?

https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#176

Post by humbleMouse » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #164

humbleMouse wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you, but why are your jenkins pipelines so complicated? I feel like your workplace's deployable artifacts should follow a familiar pattern and there should not be much guessing/re-inventing the wheel with jenkins scripts. I feel like complicated builds are usually the result of an application that is not very well thought out in the first place.

> I feel you, but why are your jenkins pipelines so complicated? You have an excellent point. Individual microservice containers are not complicated (then again, all they do is call a standardized script). The script will run a Dockerfile and push it to the registry. I would classify it as a 'trivial' Jenkins job, not even pipelines are used. The pain starts when you want to do more than CI and try to get into CD. Or…

I agree with you that bash heavy complex things are best suited for something like ansible.

However, deploying containers to environments like openshift and kubernetes is extremely simple with jenkins. I don't think that's complicated at all. As a rule of thumb, you should be able to hide all the complexity in your deployment in the dockerfile. In addition, you can always use jenkins "build with container" functionality to build your application in a dedicated container on the fly. Many ways to hide complexity with jenkins.

I do agree with you that jenkins is abused because it is more than a CI/CD tool. I think that you need some experience using it to know what works well and what doesnt. Unfortunately in the new age "sprint agile" world some random guy has to pingeonhole crap into jenkins in 2 week time windows that shouldnt be there in the first place.

I also think that many devs underestimate what you can do running local jenkins as a tar file on your macbook. I like using jenkins to automate tedious tasks for myself. As an example, it is trivial to write yourself a custom github code scanner that will scan all files and folders in as many repos as you want. I like using jenkins for outside the box things like that.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#177

Post by humbleMouse » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #158

humbleMouse wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you, but why are your jenkins pipelines so complicated? I feel like your workplace's deployable artifacts should follow a familiar pattern and there should not be much guessing/re-inventing the wheel with jenkins scripts. I feel like complicated builds are usually the result of an application that is not very well thought out in the first place.

> I feel like complicated builds are usually the result of an application that is not very well thought out in the first place. Welcome to the world of enterprise Java or .net programming. Loads upon loads of crap. Best served with multiple frontends (e.g. web + mobile) which need different npm versions to compile and all of it out of a single fucking pom.xml which is a nightmare in itself!

If you're mixing npm with pom files you are asking for trouble. Jenkin's shortcomings have nothing to do with npm's crappy package management. (not saying you said that, just pointing it out)

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#178

Post by bradrydzewski » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:42 PM UTC

rmoriz wrote: post #166

bradrydzewski wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It only works with Docker containers This will only be true for another week or two. We have devised a framework for alternate runtimes, including running pipelines directly on the host machine or in traditional virtual machines, that will be released end of week. Reference issue https://github.com/drone/drone/issues/2680

Does it support running on macOS and Windows, too? CI for native apps is IMHO the most common lock-in for Jenkins at the moment. Anything web or container related can almost always be implemented using pretty much any other CI/CD solution out there.

Yes, it supports windows, macos, and linux. I expect it will also support bsd although I have not tested this yet. This should land in master some time this week.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#179

Post by zhynn » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

Interesting, not a single mention of Vespene, or more relevantly: https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/discontinuing-vespene-17fd...

Michael DeHaan worked on it after Ansible, but he got zero traction, and so shuttered the project. I think he should have stuck it out longer, because people hate Jenkins.

Re: Jenkins Is Getting Old

#180

Post by eddieh » Mon, Apr 29, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

sudofail wrote: post #100

What I'd like to see is a CI/CD engine backend. Most CI/CD solutions have relatively the same feature set: - Code builds - Code deploys - Git Hooks - Parallel builds - Matrix builds - Build as configuration - Etc If there were an engine that supported these features, the community could create a number of frontends that target their specific needs. Jenkins was held back, in my opinion, for a number of years by its an…

Sounds like you want https://buildbot.net