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▲ bjackman a day ago

It's funny that absolutely everything about GHA fucking sucks, and everyone agrees about this. BUT, the fact that it's free compute, and it's "right there"... means it's very very difficult to say no to!

Personally I've just retired a laptop and I'm planning to turn it into a little home server. I think I'm gonna try spinning up Woodpecker on there, I'm curious to see what a CI system people don't hate is like to live with!

▲kminehart 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can already tell by their example that I don't like it. I've worked with a bunch of different container-based CI systems and I'm getting a little tired seeing the same approach by done slightly differently.

    steps:
      - name: backend
        image: golang
        commands:
          - go build
          - go test
      - name: frontend
        image: node
        commands:
          - npm install
          - npm run test
          - npm run build
Yes, it's easy to read and understand and it's container based, so it's easy to extend. I could probably intuitively add on to this. I can't say the same for GitHub, so it has that going for it.

But the moment things start to get a little complex then that's when the waste starts happening. Eventually you're going to want to _do_ something with the artifacts being built, right? So what does that look like?

Immediately that's when problems start showing up...

- You'll probably need a separate workflow that defines the same thing, but again, only this time combining them into a Docker image or a package.

    - I am only now realizing that woodpecker is a fork of Drone. This was a huuuge issue in Drone. We ended up using Starlark to generate our drone yaml because it lacked any kind of reusability and that was a big headche.
- If I were to only change a `frontend` file or a `backend` file, then I'm probably going to end up wasting time and compute rebuilding the same artifacts over and over.

    - GitHub's free component honestly hurts itself here. I don't have to care about waste if it's mostly free anyways.
- Running locally using the local backend... looks like a huge chore. In Drone this was basically impossible.

I really wish someone would take a step back and really think about the problems being solved here and where the current tooling fails us. I don't see much effort being put into the things that really suck about github actions (at least for me): legibility, waste, and the feedback loop.

▲duped 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> absolutely everything about GHA fucking sucks

By adding one file to your git repo, you get cross-platform build & test of your software that can run on every PR. If your code is open source, it's free(ish) too.

It feels like a weekend project that a couple people threw together and then has been held together by hope and prayers with more focus on scaling it than making it well designed.