
Show HN: Jet – Codeship’s CI Platform for Docker - moritzplassnig
https://codeship.com?utm_source=jetlaunch_hn
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efficacy
I love the idea of this, and I have been spending a lot of time recently with
docker compose and jet. The problem I keep coming up against is the lack of
documentation for jet. It uses a similar-but-different approach to docker
compose. Docker compose has tons of stuff available, but is focussed strongly
on describing a complete live system rather than setting up for CI.
Unfortunately, so far I have been completely unable to find any detailed
documentation for jet other than a few examples which don't do quite what I
need, so fussing with jet's yml files takes much longer and is very
frustrating.

I know the product is quite new, and I'm willing to cut it a bit of slack. I'm
also willing to contribute to a beta program or write documentation, blog
posts etc. to help others if there's any way I could get access to more
detailed information (source code with an NDA if that's all you have)

Can anyone help?

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steinnes
I'm having similar feelings. I wish Jet was better documented. I hope the
Codeship team writes some concise documentation for it, but I wonder if it's
against their best interest because it will enable tech savvier customers to
run the same CI infrastructure locally, as they are charging for in their
service?

~~~
mlocher
Ahoy @steinnes, @efficacy

We actually have plans to make the `jet` CLI open source at some point, but
need to do some spring cleaning first.

In the meantime, we'd be happy to write some more documentation. What do you
think is missing, which articles do you need the most?

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evancordell
I've been evaluating the new Docker platform for a few months, and I
definitely prefer it to anything else I've used. It fills a void that I was
frustrated existed - there aren't, or at least weren't, any CI hosts that
would take a repository with a docker-compose.yml file and let you run tests
against the services defined therein. To be clear, Jet doesn't do this
exactly, but it does let you define services with the same format as docker-
compose.yml which I've found to be even more useful.

Currently we use a custom AMI (with docker and compose installed) running
bamboo on bamboo's on-demand service, but we've been bitten a couple of times
as Bamboo updates their protocols without notice and causes our agents to
start failing. It's not an issue if you use their official AMIs, but
maintaining your own is not as easy as you'd hope.

That said, I have had some problems with the support channels at CodeShip. I
know I've just been a free user evaluating the service and am probably not a
high priority, but my experience hasn't been positive.

After activating Docker builds for my account, I was unable to get a test
build working. It turns out that this was because of an unusual bug with
service names (if I named my service `web`, it would attempt to load up what
looked like an internal codeship container instead of the one specified in my
config), but I didn't know that at the time.

My first support request was simply ignored. After a couple more months I
decided to try a build again, but the bug was still affecting me. My second
support request was dismissed as a temporary problem with the docker build
services ("running out of resources") which seemed unlikely given the
circumstances.

Through trial and error I discovered the service naming issue and followed up
on my support ticket to report it. No response to that, either.

All in all I came away thinking it was a pretty nice service with pretty lousy
support.

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MalcolmDiggs
Really excited about this. Getting docker to play nice with CI/CD tools has
been a major pain for me. Ended up writing way-to-many custom scripts to
handle the meat of the processes, but I was hoping there would be a better
way. Now it sounds like there is!

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moritzplassnig
@Evan: Thanks for the feedback, great to hear that. I'm sorry for the bad
support experience you got. We're currently building out our tooling for
providing a better support experience and are prioritizing paid customer over
anybody else. I hope we can share some of those learnings in a blog post soon.

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moritzplassnig
Codeship founder/ceo here: We would love to get your feedback! Contact details
@ profile :)

