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

twitchard.github.io

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

#171

Post by shitcoder »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #154

What would people recommend for a self-hosted CI system in 2023? I'm currently leaning towards Jenkins, because neighboring teams are using it (with some pain due to their scale, but theirs is 10x-100x ours), and I have some ~10y-old experience with it. (Our builds are compiling for embedded targets, with a Makefile-based system)

I use drone self hosted (which is what Woodpecker CI was forked from in one of the other replies). It's an alright system and it works with my Gitea instance to build executables and docker images.

I think though ironically my take away after setting everything up, was that I didn't really need to spend a lot of time to get it perfect, rather just getting it working was enough for me.

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

#172

Post by lmm »

gjvc wrote: 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 is even worse than Jenkins. Jenkins randomly breaks and you can eventually fix it, or kludge some kind of workaround. TeamCity randomly breaks and you call support and they can't fix it.

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

#173

Post by lmm »

Jenkins is the worst CI system except for all the others. Everything feels like a pile of hacks upon hacks, maintaining it is tedious and unrewarding, new functionality is always bolted on and undiscoverable. But every alternative implements the first 20% of features that provide 80% of the functionality and then never gets around to implementing the other 80% (and interestingly every attempt to "modernize" Jenkins, such as "Blue Ocean" or "Declarative Pipelines" as mentioned in the article, suffers from exactly the same problem).

I wish there was a nicer tool that worked. But there isn't.

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

#174

Post by shitcoder »

I really resonate with this post after working with Jenkins for ages. In my experience I wasn't very happy with Bash in the end either and moved to Javascript for reliability, performance and tighter integration with the Cloud were deploying to. It also allowed us to run locally and avoid having to deploy to Jenkins to test.

The discoverability issue is also a massive issue, declarative pipelines massively over promise its capability. Pipeline configuration was mostly still done in the UI because extensions had 0 documentation about how to declaratively define its configuration. Searching on the internet for the magic incantations as the author puts it is such a waste of time and I just compromised to get it running.

I'm glad this post is out there to articulate these common challenges when you invest so much into Jenkins.

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

#175

Post by fullspectrumdev »

esafak wrote: post #142
fullspectrumdev wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked at some places that were pretty huge, but the finance department absolutely fucking nickle and dime over everything . Even the smallest EC2 instances had to be accounted for with a business reason that they would accept, with audits happening every few days. Asking for a licence for something upfront was like pulling teeth.

You were in a cost center, and/or your company had no concept of productivity.

The latter. Extremely “Penny wise, pound foolish” nonsense going on.

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

#176

Post by uf00lme »

dig1 wrote: 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…

Jenkins will be around for as long as developers still code. I've always found that any significantly large software engineering office will have Jenkins running somewhere, happily on a local dev laptop/desktop or in a VM somewhere. I think it is being rarely used en-mass still which is a shame since it is free, open-source and easy to self-host.

-

I'm not sure why people are logging into Jenkins and complaining about the UI all the time; that just sounds like your pipeline needs better notifications and people are relying on Jenkins to look at build logs? If you want something prettier to look at just build out a dashboard on Grafana or similar, and centralise your build logs with artifacts and link to them with build failure notifications.

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

#177

Post by wombatpm »

j1elo wrote: post #169
hardwaresofton wrote: post #55

Gitlab CI is still the best CI in the game IMO, but GitHub Actions gives it an incredible run for it's money because of how easy action re-use is. I meant to make a blog post about this, but here's a good a place as any: GitLab absolutely innovated many hard parts of CI/CD as a platform-native piece, but it feels like they lose slightly to GitHub on what GitHub does best -- social virality for developers. The problem…

I'm in the apparently small group of people who ignores 90% of the made & shared features, and push back against making internal ops to depend too much to any particular CI system. We know how to build, package, and release our software, and at work I firmly support that we write those operations as standalone scripts that in principle could even run in the developer's machine itself. Moving them to CI is just changi…

Especially if you have to run and deploy on your own servers. Not everything can be in the cloud.

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

#178

Post by mqus »

happymellon wrote: post #62

Aside from the docker snipe I've already commented on, everywhere that I've had to deal with Jenkins it's been an issue because it's always a pet. There are always issues, and like the author, it's "only" about 25% of the time. A quarter of all builds fail due to things absolutely not related to that specific build. > oh, we were resource constraint at that one second, retry and it'll probably work > oh, we can't rep…

> oh, we were resource constraint at that one second, retry and it'll probably work

Had the same issues with (self-managed) gitlab CI. This is not jenkins-specific and usually something you can fix much easier in jenkins (other than just retrying)

> oh, we can't replicate that error message from a tool that you have no visibility over, retry and it'll probably work

This could maybe be better in other, more declarative CIs but honestly, its pretty much the same. The only thing some of them have is a local runner.

> oh, we have no idea why something timed out, retry and it will probably work

Jenkins has this, yes. But use another CI with docker and you can get the same and much worse.

But in essence, yes, at our company too, jenkins is a pet. But this means that someone knows it from the inside and outside and knows which things to fix in your pipeline. Good luck with trying to extend gitlab CI (or others) to fix things you need and/or opening an issue with them.

Gitlab has quite some high-profile issues sitting around for years with customer requests piling up. In jenkins, you'll find an extension that will do exactly what you want, or you could roll your own.

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

#179

Post by xkekjrktllss »

irrational wrote: post #45
xkekjrktllss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...for now.

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

#180

Post by DarkNova6 »

xkekjrktllss wrote: post #32
juunpp wrote: 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.

It's not a publicly traded company and not obligated to increase value for shareholders. Also, they are located in Czech Republic which has a very different business mentality, pursuing product quality over short term profits.
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