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I hate GitHub Actions with passion

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Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#221

Post by shykes »

jgautsch wrote: post #209
shykes wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working for the last 5 years on an alternative called Dagger. Ended up building a company around it. We started from the ideal state of CI, and set out to build the platform that would support that. For us this ideal state of CI boils down to 4 things: - local-first (local execution should be a first-class citizen, with no exception) - repeatable (the same inputs should yield the same output, with affordanc…

I've been watching Dagger with great interest, although have not moved production workloads to it (nor, admittedly, even committed an afternoon to setting up any workflows/graphs). Passive comment readers should be aware that ^shykes here cofounded Docker (my gratitude), so it's really worth a look. Can anyone comment on the ergonomics of Dagger after using it for a while? I was just looking at the docs earlier this…

> got confused by the AI sections...

You're not the only one... At some point last year, we discovered that CI/CD workflows and so-called "AI agent workflows" have a lot in common, and Dagger can in theory be used as an execution engine for both. We attempted to explain this - "great for CI/CD and for Agents!". But the feedback was mostly negative - it came across as confusing and lacking focus. So, we are rolling back this messaging and refocusing on CI/CD again. If you haven't checked our docs in the latest 12 hours, it's worth checking again: you'll see clear signs of this refocusing (although we are not done).

In doubt, I recommend joining our public discord server (https://discord.com/invite/dagger-io) it is basically a support group for CI/CD nerds who believe that a better way is possible, and want to discuss it with like-minded people.

Thanks for the kind words!

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#222

Post by WorldMaker »

Storment33 wrote: post #188
WorldMaker wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting because #1 is still suggesting a shell script, it's just suggesting a better shell to script.

I had no idea 'pwsh' was PowerShell. Personally not interested, maybe if your a Microsoft shop or something then yeah.

"pwsh" is often used as the short-hand for modern cross-platform PowerShell to better differentiate it from the old Windows-only PowerShell.

I think pwsh is worth exploring. It is cross-platform. It is post-Python and the Python mantra that "~~code~~ scripts are read more often than they are written". It provides a lot of nice tools out of the box. It's built in an "object-oriented" way, resembling Python and owing much to C#. When done well the "object-oriented" way provides a number of benefits over "dumb text pipes" that shells like bash were built on. It is easy to extend with C# and a few other languages, should you need to extend it.

I would consider not dismissing it off hand without trying it just because Microsoft built it and/or that it was for a while Windows-only.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#224

Post by globular-toast »

maliker wrote: post #110
woodruffw wrote: post #89

I think this post accurately isolates the single main issue with GitHub Actions, i.e. the lack of a tight feedback loop. Pushing and waiting for completion on what's often a very simple failure mode is frustrating. Others have pointed out that there are architectural steps you can take to minimize this pain, like keeping all CI operations isolated within scripts that can be run locally (and treating GitHub Actions fe…

I've standardized on getting github actions to create/pull a docker image and run build/test inside that. So if something goes wrong I have a decent live debug environment that's very similar to what github actions is running. For what it's worth.

So you've implemented GitLab CI in GitHub... We used to do this in Jenkins like 7 years ago.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#225

Post by levysoft »

Interesting, but the opening line threw me off:

> Sure, I still make fun of the PHP I remember from the days of PHP 4.1, but even then I didn’t hate it. (ref. And “PHP: Training Wheels Without a Bike” is still in the Top 10 of my favorite memes.)

I still use it to build my latest projects, and for me it’s like breathing. Simple and functional. It’s not perfect, but no language is.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#227

Post by iguessthislldo »

woodruffw wrote: post #89

I think this post accurately isolates the single main issue with GitHub Actions, i.e. the lack of a tight feedback loop. Pushing and waiting for completion on what's often a very simple failure mode is frustrating. Others have pointed out that there are architectural steps you can take to minimize this pain, like keeping all CI operations isolated within scripts that can be run locally (and treating GitHub Actions fe…

I've never used gh workflow run, but I have used the GitHub API to run workflows and wanted to show the URL. I had to have it make another call to get the workflow runs and assume the last run is the one with the correct URL. This would obviously not work correctly if there were multiple run requests at the same time. Maybe some more checking could detect that, but it works for my purposes so far.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#228

Post by jslaby »

levysoft wrote: post #225

Interesting, but the opening line threw me off: > Sure, I still make fun of the PHP I remember from the days of PHP 4.1, but even then I didn’t hate it. (ref. And “PHP: Training Wheels Without a Bike” is still in the Top 10 of my favorite memes.) I still use it to build my latest projects, and for me it’s like breathing. Simple and functional. It’s not perfect, but no language is.

Yeah, no reason for PHP to catch strays here, especially if his knowledge is still based on 4.1. It's really a whole new language compared to back then.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#229

Post by snovv_crash »

pamcake wrote: post #215
embedding-shape wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Who cares if the script is .sh, .bash, Makefile, Justfile, .py, .js or even .php? If it works it works, as long as you can run it locally, it'll be good enough, and sometimes it's an even better idea to keep it in the same language the rest of the project is. It all depends and what language a script is made in shouldn't be considered a "smell".

Shell and bash are easy to write insecurely and open your CI runners or dev machines up for exploitation by shell injection. Non-enthusiasts writing complex CI pipelines pulling and piping remote assets in bash without ShellCheck is a risky business. Python is a lot easier to write safely.

You shouldn't be pulling untrusted assets in CI regardless. Hacking your bash runner is the hardest approach anyways, just patch some subroutine in a dependency that you'll call during your build or tests.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#230

Post by hinkley »

woodruffw wrote: post #89

I think this post accurately isolates the single main issue with GitHub Actions, i.e. the lack of a tight feedback loop. Pushing and waiting for completion on what's often a very simple failure mode is frustrating. Others have pointed out that there are architectural steps you can take to minimize this pain, like keeping all CI operations isolated within scripts that can be run locally (and treating GitHub Actions fe…

I’ve contemplated building my own CI tool (with a local runner) and the thing is if you assume “write a pipeline that runs locally but also on push”, then the feature depth is mostly about queuing, analyzing output, and often left off, but IMO important, charting telemetry about the build history.

Most of these are off the shelf, at least in some programming languages. It’s the integrations and the overmanagement where a lot of the weight is.

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