Ask HN: What's the your best experience with a CI system with code on GitHub

2 points by cimaster 1 year ago | 3 comments

I'm evaluating CI tools for projects hosted on GitHub in a medium-sized enterprise. Looking at CircleCI, Jenkins, Bamboo, GitHub Actions, and Buildkite.

Since GitHub Actions is the default option, everything else is essentially being compared to it. But none of them really stand out—most have some limitations when working with GitHub, while GHA itself feels pretty barebones, requiring extra work to build out missing features (like proper test reporting).

For those who’ve worked with CI and GitHub, what’s been your best experience? Any lessons learned or recommendations?

olafmol 1 year ago |

You mention you're looking for (ao) "proper test reporting". CircleCI has a "Test Insights" view (https://circleci.com/docs/insights-tests/) and can collect test-results from a wide range of formats: https://circleci.com/docs/collect-test-data/#test-runner-exa...

Are you looking for something specific that you're missing in the current offerings regarding test reporting?

(Disclaimer: I work at CircleCI)

cimaster 1 year ago | |

Test reporting isn’t the most critical aspect, just an example of something GHA leaves for third party tools to implement.

With CurcleCI, looking through docs, the biggest concern is integration with GitHub. Reading limitations of both OAuth and GitHub App integrations it looks like there’s a race to catch-up with changes a limitations on GitHub side. Not sure if it’s GH not exposing some functionality to third parties to differentiate Actions (e.g. GHA having many more trigger events available) or is that CircleCI needs more time to implement missing features through GitHub App integrations.

olafmol 1 year ago | | |

Thanks for clarifying, appreciate it! It's true we don't support all the events that Github exposes, but we believe we support the most common and useful ones. Also, this is not set in stone and expanding all the time, f.e. https://circleci.com/changelog/trigger-pipelines-on-github-p...