Concourse CI Hits 1.0.0

151 points by zachgersh 10 years ago | 68 comments

pekk 10 years ago |

I wish documentation would offer a "Concourse made easy" or something.

I imagine the documentation is currently a work in progress. But starting for example from Github, it is extremely easy to go down a deep dark hole trying to figure out all the new terms: I guess I have to use BOSH, what is BOSH (itself a deep dark hole: uhh, stemcell? How does this relate to all the other similar tools? Why would I commit to using this new tool solely for the sake of Concourse?); now I have to learn a new strange distinction between the otherwise similar English words "job" and "task," something about Garden (yet another hole to travel) and a new meaning for the acronym "TSA" and for some reason the command line utility is called "fly" which has no obvious relationship to the project name (what if the command to interact with git were "spudge"?) can I please just install a .deb and run a service and add a build real quick to try this out?

This could be why it is so common to see Jenkins deployed everywhere. While it is wrongly designed in so many frustrating ways, you can still set it up for real work in an hour or so, and you won't need a dictionary to translate from a unique new jargon into English just to try it out. Every new CI that makes this even one bit harder than Jenkins isn't trying hard enough.

vito 10 years ago | |

I'm curious to know how your flow through the docs went. We inlined "getting started" into the main page, and had the Setting Up section show "vagrant up" first, and we have warnings above sections that are not critical to know before learning Concourse itself, which then take you right to "Hello World". It's already optimized for "Concourse made easy" - but perhaps our navigation is not?

I should probably add a warning above the BOSH section though, or even the binaries section.

The trouble is, reality is complicated, regardless of whether it's documented or not. I've found that a lot of open source projects simply don't document things to give an illusion of simplicity; people just forget all the manual labor they had to do after downloading that .deb and installing it across 10 machines and maintaining those machines over time. Our docs cover BOSH as our preferred tool for clusters. If you don't want to use BOSH, just use the binaries and your own deployment tool.

We don't build .debs yet; as soon as we do other people will want .yum, and another will want Docker images, so we built the binaries that will feed into those first, which is often what I look for when kicking the tires on something anyway.

challiwill 10 years ago | |

There is a simple 'vagrant up' you can do that allows you to play with Concourse without needing to learn about all the other tooling such as BOSH. It's a great way to get started. Take a look:

Check out VM setup here: http://concourse.ci/vagrant.html Setting up first pipeline here: http://concourse.ci/using-concourse.html

This gets you going with a local Concourse instance that you can experiment with. You're right that it can feel like "turtles all the way down" (quoting @oblio from earlier today), but you do not need to jump in with BOSH right away.

In regards to how to think about 'job' vs 'task', I like to think of 'Job's as a description of what the module is attempting to achieve. For example in the Concourse team's own pipeline[1] you'll see a 'job' named "deploy". 'Task's are on the other hand the individual things that need to happen in order to complete the 'job'.

-- 1. http://ci.concourse.ci/

mewse 10 years ago | | |

Sadly, while it's easy to play with the software this way, the 'vagrant up' implementation is missing a bunch of functionality; you don't get any authentication functionality, and you don't get the ability to attach external workers. Also, as of right now, the vagrant build hasn't even been updated to the 1.0 release; it's still limited to version 0.76.0. So you can't play with this new Concourse release using a vagrant box in the first place.

I've had a brief struggle with trying to get the standalone executables to work under Linux, without any success (I'm told that they probably are incompatible with my server's kernel version; note that the documentation does not state what kernel or OS versions are supported). Similarly, I've had a brief look at what it'd take to set up an install using BOSH.. but it looks like that's going to be a massive undertaking.

As a practical matter, if you want to use Concourse for real work, you probably do have to jump in with BOSH right away, since the standalone versions are likely not to work with your VMs, and the vagrant version is missing critical features and hasn't even been updated to the 1.0 release.

mead5432 10 years ago | | |

I really wish there was a docker container for this. I was going to make one but didn't have the energy to dig into the documentation about installation from binaries. Maybe later...

dannyrosen 10 years ago |

Full Disclosure: I also work at Pivotal on a team that has done a large amount of automation using Concourse (check out our pipelines [1])

Things that we've done so far with Concourse:

* A dependency check notifier that based on an RSS feed from various language maintainers: Sends an email, updates our pivotal tracker account, sends a message to our slack channel

* A job, that based on the completion of a build will upload the resulting artifact to Github and tag the release with a new version, auto generated release notes and checksums

* Travis.ci style github pull request analysis

* A security feed monitor that notifies us when a part of our application is vulnerable and when it is, kicks off a build and sends an email notification

* Automatically updates submodules and gems for git repos and runs specs and tests against the updated artifact.

These tasks were not difficult to implement. Every pipeline for Concourse is explicitly defined in its configuration file [2], which we version control. There is never any reconfiguring or rebuilding "snowflake" servers when we re-deploy our Concourse VMs. They rebuild identically based on the config files.

[1] - http://buildpacks-ci.cfapps.io (Chrome friendly, Firefox not)

[2] - https://github.com/cloudfoundry/buildpacks-ci

jacques_chester 10 years ago |

I work at Pivotal, which sponsors Concourse development, so I got one of the fancy t-shirts we made for this occasion.

I wore it to the office today. Other people in the office were coming up to me and raving about Concourse. I've been proselytising it, but I feel like pretty soon I just won't have to. One of my colleagues was telling me that in two days he got an iOS CI pipeline that he never managed to achieve with weeks of tinkering with TeamCity.

I suspect that pretty soon the default choice for CI/CD in Pivotal Labs projects will be Concourse, and that will seed it pretty widely.

If you want to get in on the ground floor of something great, here's a good opportunity.

If you're wondering about what the heck it is, go to the homepage for the 40,000 view: http://concourse.ci/

If you're wondering why the heck another CI system, look at "Concourse Vs.": http://concourse.ci/concourse-vs.html

After that my advice is to look at public Concourse pipelines and pop the hood. And drop into the Slack channel, the team are in there now posting funny gifs. I'm in there too, under jchester_robojar, if you want to ask me anything.

kkapelon 10 years ago |

Congratulations for this release.

However as already seen in the case of GoCD, the success of Concourse will depend on how easy it is to convince Jenkins believers.

The "vs Jenkins page" needs to be augmented with more information regarding workers, plugins and simple jobs scripts.

At the moment that page is not really convincing

1)"Jenkins servers become snowflakes" All configuration is saved on the disk as XML files. Backing them up or putting them in version control is very easy. Restoring Jenkins servers is very easy. I have done this actually.

2)"Jenkins has no first class support for pipelines" True. But Jenkins 2.0 will be designed around pipelines, so once it is released this argument will no longer hold. And even today with 1.x not all organizations use pipelines (or are happy with the existing plugins)

3)"Trying to find the build output log for a failed build in Jenkins can be up to 3 clicks from the home page" That is not really an argument. I get an email when my build fails.

As others have mentioned having readers understand new concepts in order to run/use if effectively is problematic.

The UI is impressive! Congrats! I think you should market this more.

Basically if the effort required to setup Concourse with 2 workers is bigger then setting up the respective Jenkins setup, Concourse adoption will suffer.

It needs to be stressed that for a lot of small/middle sized companies, the build server is just an afterthought. Not everybody has full time people working on setting up pipelines.

raziel2p 10 years ago |

I'm looking forward to experimenting with this.

At least in the documentation, there seems to be a lot of focus on extra tools. BOSH seems very off-putting. Having to use the "fly" CLI command to update pipeline configuration seems unnecessary - can I just update the files on the filesystem myself, either via my configuration management tool or a git repository?

twic 10 years ago | |

This is very much a trait of BOSH. When BOSH manages a machine, it owns that machine. It deploys the stuff that's specified in the manifest, but that has to come out of one or more 'releases', ie precisely structured tarballs of stuff, and there's no way to manage a file here or a setting there. You could push out a file by packing into a release, uploading that, and adding it to the manifest, but that's quite a ritual for one file. You are essentially expected to treat the machine as a black box.

As a result, BOSH-based systems tend to be managed via APIs exposed by the software running on them, which often come with a command-line tool. BOSH itself is like this, and so is Cloud Foundry.

This is a very different approach to tools like Puppet or Ansible, which are much more about openness and empowering the operator to directly manage machines. Although it is fairly similar to Docker etc, where you fire up images without any sensible way to fiddle with them, and rely on talking to the software.

So, if you are comfortable with the Puppet/Ansible type tools, then you won't like BOSH. This is 30% because BOSH isn't as good as them, but 70% just because it's different.

avtar 10 years ago |

For anyone else that got excited about having a Jenkins alternative, this project seems to be only about containers and not other workloads that VMs could tackle, such as running browser or desktop-based software tests. At least that's my understanding after giving the documentation a cursory glance. Could someone familiar with the project please confirm (or hopefully correct) this?

twic 10 years ago | |

Some of my colleagues at Pivotal are running iOS builds with it. That is, they're running builds on a Mac which has an iOS device plugged into it. The workers are run using Houdini, which is a container management daemon that, er doesn't use containers:

https://github.com/vito/houdini

There's a blog post by someone else at Pivotal, although the details are probably a bit out of date by now:

https://blog.pivotal.io/labs/tech-talks/on-device-open-sourc...

topherbullock 10 years ago | | |

As the author of that blog post I can confirm some of that is out of date. Hopefully I can find some time to update the post for 1.0, but the main concepts still work.

At Pivotal Toronto we're running iOS and Android builds using a mac mini as an external worker. What's been a great built in feature is using the pool resource to "check-out" a device and lock it from other tests while a suite is running.

vito 10 years ago | |

We run browser-based tests in our own pipeline (I'm on the Concourse team). We just use `xvfb-run` around our test script. We also build VirtualBox images using a systemd-based Garden backend running on a dedicated server (not a VM).

I find these approaches better than risking test pollution, especially when it comes to building VMs and spinning up desktop apps.

manojlds 10 years ago | |

Not using ConcourseCI, but I use containers for our browser testing. Blogged about it here - http://stacktoheap.com/blog/2016/01/04/running-webdriverio-t...

jacques_chester 10 years ago | |

I am running a browser-based test in Concourse as we speak :)

jperras 10 years ago |

I very much appreciate the "Concourse vs." page[1] which compares Concourse to several other CI solutions, but I wish they would include Buildbot[2]. Everyone always forgets about Buildbot!

Buildbot can integrate with Docker to run tasks on containers, create complex conditional flows with triggered builds/steps (among others), and has been in use for many years at organizations large & small.

While the YAML based Concourse configurations seem very useful, we've found that for many non-trivial pipeline style builds are better served by being written in a fully functional language like Python. It has some disadvantages compared to a declarative approach taken by Travis & Concourse, but I feel that they outweigh the limitations imposed by the latter.

The next version of buildbot is also being refactored into a core + plugins system, which should allow for some pretty impressive flexibility that should serve the needs of almost everyone.

1. https://concourse.ci/concourse-vs.html 2. http://docs.buildbot.net/latest/

zoomzoom 10 years ago |

Have recently rebuilt CI systems at work, and took a look at Concourse alongside Jenkins, Buildbot and Gitlab. Seems like not so many people have mentioned gitlab on this thread, but in my experience it combines all the benefits of Concourse (pipeline-driven workflows, passing forward build artifacts, config in source control) with a much simpler architecture. Concourse looks so complex and has so many moving pieces to learn - BOSH, fly, etc...

Gitlab is just a rails app and then has a go-based runner to do the CI work. Omnibus packages make installation easy. They even have some autoscaling stuff for the runners using docker engine there which I still think needs some work for my use case but for may others is ready to go and looks awesome.

CI covers so many use cases and so there is lots of room for different alternatives, but make sure to check out gitlab if you're looking for the simplest and most flexible CI system I've yet to see :)

sytse 10 years ago | |

Thanks for mentioning GitLab, glad to hear you like it!

We just officially released the autoscaling runner in https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab-runner-1-1-releas... Please let me know what we can do to improve it for your use case.

Also see my other comment in this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11387327

rdoherty 10 years ago |

This looks awesome! I hope to transition to it, handling Jenkins configurations is a huge pain.

Some of people also use their CI tools for running arbitrary one-off scripts (like deploys). Is this possible with Concourse? Currently we have a few Jenkins jobs that just execute a fab task that then does the actual work.

XenoPhex 10 years ago | |

Yup! Concourse has an idea of 'one-off' builds that can be executed from fly as long as you provide all the inputs to the task. This can be done via "fly execute": http://concourse.ci/fly-execute.html

vito 10 years ago | |

In addition to what XenoPhex said (`fly execute`) you can always just configure a job that's only ever manually triggered.

clem 10 years ago |

Does Concourse offer any integration with defect or agile development software that allows an easy way to track which builds contain a given feature or defect fix?

twic 10 years ago | |

There is, predictably, an integration to Pivotal Tracker:

https://github.com/concourse/tracker-resource

I'm not aware of any others. It might not do quite what you want - it's more about pushing the progress of the CI pipeline into Tracker than about bringing information from Tracker into the CI pipeline.

However, resources are fairly easy to write:

https://concourse.ci/resources.html

So if your task tracker of choice has an API (or a command-line tool!), it should be kind of easy to build an equivalent.

krishicks 10 years ago | |

You can add a custom resource type (http://concourse.ci/resource-types.html) to add these integrations.

There's a Pivotal Tracker resource that does what you describe: https://github.com/concourse/tracker-resource

tantalic 10 years ago |

Are there any plans to support OS X workers? This would be extremely helpful for Mac and iOS apps.

jacques_chester 10 years ago | |

Yes, via "Houdini": https://github.com/vito/houdini

Concourse uses the Garden API to manage containers. Houdini is a "no-op" implementation that just tells Garden "yep, I've got your container right here".

vito 10 years ago | |

There are prebuilt OS X binaries available on the Downloads page. Each binary supports both running the web UI and acting as a worker:

https://concourse.ci/downloads.html