
GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories - dstaheli
https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-ci-cd/
======
hn_throwaway_99
This is very interesting to me. It also makes me think about the natural rise
of monopolies and monoculture in tech. GitHub has really been extending to
"eating the world" as of late. Recently in terms of their package registry
that must have folks like Artifactory and Nexus a bit shaken, and now this,
which is bad news for folks like CircleCI (and I say this as a CircleCI user).

As a developer, in the short term I love this. Fewer things I need to cobble
together and worry about how to integrate. I mean, it's already the case that
if GitHub goes down that my CircleCI jobs won't work, so having one company to
yell at and monitor alone is a plus.

But long term it makes the competitive ecosystem much less robust. And as a
startup employee, makes me feel how disrupting established platform
competitors gets that much more difficult - even if you have a better product,
it's hard to fight against the "platform" as they have more integrated points
of value.

~~~
manigandham
A monopoly is not inherently bad. They often benefit users with increased
efficiency and productivity. They're only bad when progress stagnates and/or
prices rise.

In this case, Github is actively competing and adding features that helps all
of their users. If that means that some other companies lose market share then
it's just a sign that the value proposition has changed. I see no problem with
this, it's how the market works.

~~~
eklavya
In what real scenario do you see a monopoly not doing exactly what monopolies
do? Do they have some moral code they can't break? Do they hate money? What
exactly is it that would make them immune to human tendencies?

~~~
clarkmoody
Monopolies are subject to the laws of economics.

GitHub has gained near-monopoly status because it has provided a superior user
experience at a great price. If either of those value propositions start to
crumble,

    
    
      git remote add ...
    

Exploitative monopolies almost always have help from the state: The Patent
Office, Interstate Commerce Commission, Federal Reserve, FDA, etc either grant
monopoly or cartel privilege to their customers. Monopolies achieved on the
market cannot be sustained without continuing to satisfy customer demands.

~~~
elevenbits
The point I think is that as GitHub adds more and more integrations (git +
issues + fork graph + CI/CI + ...) then it's not so simple to move to another
service. The vertical is more convenient until you realize you're an Oracle
customer all over again.

~~~
skissane
With CI, I wonder if someone could build a tool which had some sort of DSL to
define your CI pipeline, and then translated that to configuration files for
multiple CI providers (Travis CI, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.) If
you write all your CI pipelines in that DSL, then moving to another provider
would be just telling the tool to generate output for another backend.

(One issue is that such a DSL could only provide lowest common denominator
functionality... or else, suppose CI providers 1 and 2 offer feature X but 3
and 4 don't, then if you use feature X, you can switch between 1 and 2, but
the tool would give an "unsupported feature" error if you tried to generate
output for 3 or 4.)

~~~
oefrha
Having migrated from Travis to CircleCI for most of my active projects, I’d
say their models are so vastly different it’s pretty much impossible to have
an AST of sort that can be translated to both except for the simplest and most
well-encapsulated cases (at least not before Travis supposedly improved Docker
support, by which point I was already gone).

------
sytse
This is great news for developers. The trend has been to combine version
control and CI for years now. For a timeline see
[https://about.gitlab.com/2019/08/08/built-in-ci-cd-
version-c...](https://about.gitlab.com/2019/08/08/built-in-ci-cd-version-
control-secret/)

This is bad news for the CI providers that depend on GitHub, in particular
CircleCI. Luckily for them (or maybe they saw this coming) they recently
raised a series D [https://circleci.com/blog/we-raised-a-56m-series-d-what-s-
ne...](https://circleci.com/blog/we-raised-a-56m-series-d-what-s-next-for-
circleci-customers/) and are already looking to add support for more
platforms. It is hard to depend on a marketplace when it starts competing with
you, from planning (Waffle.io), to dependency scanning (Gemnasium acquired by
us), to CI (Travis CI layoff where especially sad).

It is interesting that a lot of the things GitHub is shipping is already part
of Azure DevOps [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/azure/architecture/example-...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-dotnet-webapp) The overlap
between Azure DevOps and GitHub seems to increase instead of to be reduced. I
wonder what the integration story is and what will happen to Azure DevOps.

~~~
snitko
It's a horrible trend. CI should not be tied to version control. I mean we all
have to deal with it now, but I'd much rather have my CI agnostic and not have
config files for it checked into the repo.

I've browsed through the article you linked to, one of the subtitles was
"Realizing the future of DevOps is a single application". Also a horrible
idea: I think it locks developers into a certain workflow which is hard to
escape. You have an issue with your setup you can't figure out - happened to
me with Gitlab CI - sorry, you're out of luck. Every application is different,
DevOps processes is something to be carefully crafted for each particular case
with many considerations: large/small company, platform, development cycle,
people preferred workflow etc. What I like to do is to have small well tested
parts constitute my devops. It's a bad idea to adopt something just because
everyone is doing this.

To sum it up, code should be separate from testing, deployment etc. On our
team, I make sure developers don't have to think about devops. They know how
to deploy and test and they know the workflow and commands. But that's about
it.

~~~
clinta
I'm an operations guy, but I think I have a different perspective. The
developers I work with don't have to think about CI/CD, but the configuration
still lives in the repo, I'm just a contributer to that repo like they are.

Having CI configuration separate from the code sounds like a nightmare when a
code change requires CI configurations to be updated. A new version of code
requires a new dependency for instance, there needs to be a way to tie the CI
configuration change with a commit that introduced that dependency. That comes
automatically when they're in the same repo.

~~~
structural
Having CI configuration inside the codebase also sounds like a nightmare when
changes to the CI or deployment environment require configuration changes or
when multiple CI/deployment environments exist.

For example as a use case: Software has dozens of tagged releases;
organization moves from deploying on AWS to deploying in a Kubernetes cluster
(requiring at least one change to the deployment configuration). Now, to
deploy any of the old tagged releases, every release now has to be updated
with the new configuration. This gets messy because there are two different
orthogonal sets of versions involved. First, the code being developed has
versions and second, the environments for testing, integration, and deployment
also change over time and have versions to be controlled.

Even more broadly, consider multiple organizations using the same software
package. They will each almost certainly have their own CI infrastructure, so
there is no one "CI configuration" that could ever be checked into the
repository along with the code without each user having to maintain their own
forks/patchsets of the repo with all the pain that entails.

~~~
nullspace
> organization moves from deploying on AWS to deploying in a Kubernetes
> cluster

I had (and still have) high hopes for circleci's orbs to help with this use
case. Unfortunately, orbs are private - which makes it a no-go for us.

But, in my dream world, we have bits of the deployed configuration that can be
imported from else where - and this is built right into the CI system.

In practice, for my org, the code and configuration for the CI comes from both
the "infra" repo as well as the "application" repo. The configuration itself
is stored in the app repo, but then there's a call `python
deploy_to_kubernetes.py <args>`. The `deploy_to_xxx.py` script would be in the
"infra" repo.

It also depends on your workflow - do you change the common deploy
infrastructure more often, or do you change the application specific deploy
infra more often.

Yeah, writing code to deploy code is sometimes fun, but sometimes nasty.

------
bamboozled
Just a warning for those who haven't ventured into actions yet, I would have
to say so far I've found the experience very, very average. Even just doing
something simple like posting a release notification to Slack seems to end up
with me having the action triggered a random number of times causing multiple
messages being posted to slack. The whole experience feels amateur and clunky.

There are issues open to look into it but no fix in sight yet. While this
announcement sounds useful, don't throw away your current CI/CD tooling which
is probably a lot nicer to use.

Lastly I really dislike how pretty much any really useful actions are created
and maintained by single people. There are just some actions I'd want to see
be supported by GitHub, I don't wan to have to handover things like Slack
access keys to a non-trusted third party to post messages.

Every time I try to use actions I'm surprised it was launched in it's current
obscure, unpolished state.

~~~
bob1029
This feature release has been a dumpster fire from my perspective. I love
GitHub and what they are trying to do, but I read over the Actions
documentation 2x and I still can't tell if my use case is supported: I just
want to see if master builds on a net core app without spinning up or
otherwise utilizing some other cloud instance.

Also, I am not even sure what the appropriate syntax to use is with all the
mixed messaging and examples (YAML or the other thing? Which do I use!?).

Regardless of which variant of syntax I attempted, the actions UI told me
there was some generic error and that nothing was to be done. One additional
problem I noticed is that if you have a protected master branch, you are going
to be forced to get code reviews from your team every single time you try to
iterate on the workflow script. There is no apparent way to test or validate
actions without committing directly to master and seeing what the result may
be.

All around, a complete mess in my estimation. I will be sticking with Jenkins
for the foreseeable future. This GH feature is apparently not designed for
people who care about straightforward solutions to simple problems:

    
    
      git clone <repo>
      dotnet build
      <if failure, flag build, create issue, send email, etc>
    

That is all I want to do, Microsoft. Can you handle that? I feel like there
should just be a simple toggle switch in my GH repo for this concern,
considering Microsoft is now responsible for that entire vertical stack.

------
theptip
As a Gitlab user that's not strongly committed to the platform, this looks
like a pretty interesting option.

Anyone have thoughts on how this compares to e.g. Google Cloud Builder in
terms of functionality? Being integrated into the GH backend seems like a big
perk, rather than having to use webhooks for everything.

Seems like you can do things like build your Docker containers
([https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-
actions...](https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-
actions/creating-a-docker-container/)).

One thing that's great about Gitlab is the Gitlab server/runner split, where
you can run workers in your own VPC, but still use their hosted offering. This
makes it easier to keep your deploy secrets (aka the keys to the kingdom)
locked down, as they never leave your cloud provider.

~~~
t3rabytes
> Google Cloud Builder

It's actually Cloud Build under the covers. Their Actions Library sure beats
have to figure out how to write the configs yourself for GCB though.

~~~
ItalyPaleAle
> It's actually Cloud Build under the covers

Nope, it's actually something based on Azure Pipelines' code (on a different
infrastructure)

[https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1159526215658561536](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1159526215658561536)

~~~
t3rabytes
Ah, that must be a change with the more recent revisions then. The original
version was definitely using Cloud Build.

~~~
DannyBee
They swapped it post-acquisition. (Google and Github started working together
more, MS acquired them, that stopped :P)

------
saagarjha
If you're curious about the platforms they have:
[https://help.github.com/en/articles/software-in-virtual-
envi...](https://help.github.com/en/articles/software-in-virtual-environments-
for-github-actions)

------
koalaphant
There was a lot of hubbub over Microsoft acquiring GH a while back. Have yet
to see anything negative come out of it.

------
vitomd
People will think twice when investing the time & money in develop an app for
the github marketplace as if it succeed, Github could just built the app
inside their system. They bought PullPanda which was good for his creator
because I think it was less expensive that build that themselves.

~~~
dragonwriter
> People will think twice when investing the time & money in develop an app
> for the github marketplace as if it succeed, Github could just built the app
> inside their system.

That's always a concern with platforms with attached marketplaces (heck, it's
even potentially an issue with building apps for OS’s, even if they don't have
an attached marketplace—ask Netscape.)

------
marceloabsousa
Is it official now that Github is becoming Gitlab?

Does anyone know how they are going to bill for the compute used in the CI?

~~~
NathanKP
The features page has a pricing table:
[https://github.com/features/actions](https://github.com/features/actions)

It is totally free for public repos. For private repos:

\- Free accounts get 2000 free minutes

\- Pro accounts get 3000 free minutes

\- Team accounts get 10k free minutes

\- Enterprise accounts get 50k free minutes

Additional runner minutes are:

\- Linux: $0.008 per min

\- Windows: $0.016 per min

\- macOS: $0.08 per min (yeah that's not a typo, it is copied straight from
the page, macOS is mad expensive)

~~~
marceloabsousa
Thanks!

I'm not sure if for large open source projects, these machines will be nearly
enough to run the CI jobs.

The price for Linux seems quite steep when you compare with for example what
you pay with GCP.

It will be interesting to see the Github security teams catching those
"public" repos doing nasty stuff like mining crypto - even with hard timeouts
on each job it will be cool to see how this plays out!

~~~
dmlittle
For large open source projects it's free. Over time I can see them expanding
their feature set including more powerful machines.

~~~
marceloabsousa
I didn't mean about the costs for large OS projects but on the requirements.
As an example, in my experience, I couldn't build the `semantic` project
([https://github.com/github/semantic](https://github.com/github/semantic))
with those requirements.

------
rehemiau
It always supported CI/CD, they just changed their marketing strategy from "No
it's not just CI/CD" to "Yes we have CI/CD now"

~~~
0xffff2
What have they “always” supported exactly? I’ve used GitHub for a long time,
but I use it entirely as a git server and sometimes an issue tracker. That
said, I’m pretty sure they didn’t support anything that even remotely
resembles CI/CD back when I started using it.

~~~
ithkuil
I was using GitHub actions to do build, test and push to production for a
while now, with the older syntax (the one without yaml). I'm not sure exactly
what changed now, and the messaging is indeed confusing

------
scanr
I wonder what they'll offer for Github Enterprise. Especially for
organisations that are using it on prem and would prefer not to use Azure for
builds.

Anyone know?

~~~
myself-or-not
There are self-hosted Build agents and eventually this will become available
inside GitHub Enterprise Server too (after it GA’s)

~~~
wyldfire
> (after it GA’s)

What's the typical latency for these kinds of features to arrive?

~~~
myself-or-not
Nat just said on stage Nov 13 for GA (for GHES it will be later)

~~~
wyldfire
"on stage" \-- is there a Github/related conference in progress?

~~~
lbotos
There was a live streamed announcement:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1OunoCyuhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1OunoCyuhY)

------
renke1
I couldn't quickly find out if these features are now supported but what I
really want is:

\- Actions can fail, but still continue (more like an additional
success/failure status)

\- Manually triggered actions (maybe with parameters that need to be entered
by the user)

\- Artifacts attached to actions especially HTML reports (next to plain text,
this is the universal output type for a lot of quality tools)

~~~
chrisrpatterson
Hi, GitHub Actions product manager here.

Thanks for your interest in GitHub Actions. You can set a property `continue-
on-error: true` for each step and the runner will ignore a failed result and
continue the workflow. For more details on workflow configuration please see
[https://help.github.com/en/articles/workflow-syntax-for-
gith...](https://help.github.com/en/articles/workflow-syntax-for-github-
actions)

Workflow runs can be triggered via a `repository_dispatch` event with a custom
payload. Using this model you could create a tool to allow for manual
triggering. However, we do expect to provide a more integrated experience for
triggering manual runs with custom inputs.

More capabilities for actions to post artifacts and reports as part of our
experience is absolutely on our radar.

We are working to bring as many new users into the beta as quickly as we can
and we look forward to your feedback.

------
abalaji
Really interesting. My project just migrated to Azure DevOps and I noticed
that their configuration file looks really similar. My suspicion is that Azure
DevOps is backing GitHub CI/CD.

~~~
miskander
Hey there, I’m the Director of Engineering at GitHub with the team working on
Actions. We really wanted to get an extremely flexible and powerful SDLC
automation platform into our users hands as fast as possible. To do that we
borrowed some code and infra from Pipelines to be able to offer a rock-solid
CI/CD to every developer on GitHub sooner, and to be able to scale out to 40
million developers. With hosted runners, you’ll be able to run your Actions
builds in any cloud, or even on your own hardware; if you don’t want to set
that up, builds run on VMs and containers in Azure by default. You can use
Actions to deploy anywhere and we have AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud actions to
enable you to get started right away. If you want to read up a bit more about
our virtual environments as well as what powers our runners check, we have
some of that info in our docs here:
[https://help.github.com/en/articles/virtual-environments-
for...](https://help.github.com/en/articles/virtual-environments-for-github-
actions).

~~~
asdfman123
I feel like everyone who uses MS these days and still doesn't carry over
distrust cultivated in the 90s knows that the problem isn't going to be lock
in. But I'm sure MS's end game is to make you _want_ to use Azure more, which
is fair game.

------
wyldfire
Free CI/CD for repos public and private is one thing that makes Gitlab really
attractive to me. If Github's is simple/sane enough I would probably consider
that also.

~~~
Smotko
I've been using GitHub actions for my personal projects for the past few
months. The documentation was not the best and the UX was not polished at all,
so the experience was painful sometimes. A lot of my problems will be solved
with the features announced today, except I'm not sure if they're also adding
a way to cache e.g. dependencies between jobs.

While writing your own actions was painful (at least for me), reusing actions
that other people wrote worked like magic. I think the reusability aspect is
going to be huge when Actions get more and more popular.

------
oaiey
I do not understand why Microsoft finances this. I understand the hosting as a
specialized social platform, but GitHub Actions vs. Azure DevOps Pipelines are
a duplicated effort. Better integration for GitHub for the Azure DevOps suite
would solve that in a similar way without duplication of capabilities.

~~~
zenlikethat
All roads lead to Azure. Github's user base is far bigger than Azure's user
base, and Microsoft wants to eventually get as many people as possible buying
IaaS (or equivalents).

The next logical step after Github Actions for CI/CD is to offer Github as a
place to run the production code too. You would be buying Azure with fewer
steps. It's pretty arbitrary that we develop code in one place while then
going off and using a separate suite of tools and processes to run it. Having
a suite for everything in one place could be very appealing to the market.

~~~
penagwin
If they added a button that was essentially just zeit now it would be
revolutionary. Especially if they had a generous free tier. Imagine one click
hosting for blogs, etc. Now THAT would certainly hook people in

~~~
rstat1
That sounds a bit like Github Pages which has been a thing for a while.

~~~
giobox
Sure, if your site is solely static content, which is all GitHub pages
supports. You can’t run “production code”.

I know some people use the service with a static site generator as a free way
to host a blog, but it’s not really the same thing at all.

~~~
arsa
Works pretty good for blogs and in general if you use serverless tech.

However i wouldn't consider it for mission critical stuff - github's
infrastructure can't be compared to actual paid-for cloud hosting.

~~~
reggieband
> github's infrastructure can't be compared to actual paid-for cloud hosting.

I think the idea in this thread is that since github is owned by MS, and they
have Azure, that won't be an accurate statement for very long. Github doesn't
have to build that infrastructure, they just need to competently integrate
into MS existing infrastructure.

I can't believe I didn't piece this together sooner but I agree with this
threads premise. I'm already hosting my source on Github so why not build it
there? And if I'm building it there then why not deploy it there? Rather than
manage a complicated pipeline, I just `git push` and everything else just
works ... all the way to massive scale.

As someone who has worked on hand-built github to AWS pipelines ... I can
actually see this being the killer feature Azure needs to actually win a large
market share.

------
jeanleplar
[https://twitter.com/anoff_io/status/1159512381728407552](https://twitter.com/anoff_io/status/1159512381728407552)

True? microsoft person on stage
[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/author/jeremy-
eplingou...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/author/jeremy-
eplingoutlook-com/)

Sorry Github! Not good!

------
the_duke
Meanwhile, I still haven't been invited to the beta...

~~~
the_duke
Seems like complaining on HN works, I've been invited!

------
qubyte
I've been on the beta for a while, and while it was understandably limited, I
really enjoy it and have done a lot with it. I'm excited about the
announcement because it appears that a lot more can be done now.

However, it's not clear what happens to existing actions and workflows. Do
they just stop working? Can actions still be made from a dockerfile and
entrypoint script?

~~~
judge2020
See -

[https://twitter.com/gimenete/status/1159521518403145728?s=20](https://twitter.com/gimenete/status/1159521518403145728?s=20)

[https://help.github.com/en/articles/migrating-github-
actions...](https://help.github.com/en/articles/migrating-github-actions-from-
hcl-syntax-to-yaml-syntax)

Already used the "migrate-actions" binary on a few projects, and while I don't
have the new version enabled (you'll get a notification when the repo is
available for an upgrade), this is better in terms of simplicity since you
don't have to manage action references or the "resolves" field (when you were
manually editing the hcl).

The only downgrade is that it doesn't look like you can run actions in
parallel within the same "job"; so you can't have eg. "cd project1 -> npm i"
and "cd project2 -> npm i" running at the same time and then have a third
action that can use the output/filesytem of both of those commmands. Now the
"job" will run one, wait for completion, then run the other, then you can have
an action that uses the changes of those.

~~~
qubyte
Thanks for the links! I'll miss the old workflow and its syntax (allowing for
parallelism), but I'm keeping an open mind.

------
paulcarroty
Free 2,000 minutes per month, not bad. No info about ssh debug - top feature
for any CI service.

~~~
enricosada
Appveyor also support stop and RDP in the windows build agents for 60 minutes
each build. really nice for diagnose the issues

------
cyode
Lots of comments here about what this means for CircleCI. Found it interesting
that CircleCI's CEO has a testimonial in the "What our community is saying" at
[https://github.com/features/actions](https://github.com/features/actions):

“CircleCI has been building a CI/CD platform since 2011, and GitHub has been a
great partner. GitHub Actions is further validation that CI/CD is critical for
the success of every software team. We believe that developers thrive in open,
connected ecosystems, and we look forward to working with GitHub to lead the
evolution of CI/CD.” Jim Rose CEO of CircleCI

~~~
pinko
That's kind of a content-free statement, unfortunately.

Although it's possible they can successfully position themselves as the
premium upgrade, it's hard to see how this isn't a threat to CircleCI.

------
kkapelon
I work for Codefresh a CI/CD solution for Kubernetes/Helm/Docker.

One of our main goals when creating Codefresh was to make plugins that are not
tied to Codefresh itself. As a result we followed the obvious model with
plugins where they are just docker images and nothing else.

[https://steps.codefresh.io/](https://steps.codefresh.io/)

We are very glad to see that Github actions follows the same model. This means
that we instantly get all Github actions as possible Codefresh plugins (and
the opposite).

I would be really happy if other CI companies follow suit so that eventually a
central CI/CD plugin repository can be created for all competing solutions.

------
servercobra
Woahhhhh, MacOS support? That's enough for me to switch from CircleCI right
now. $40/mo to Circle is just a lot to do CI/CD for some React Native apps,
with CD only getting kicked off once a week or so.

------
dubcanada
I really want to try GitHub Actions but I signed up as soon as it was released
and I am still waiting for an invite.

I am mostly just excited for it to be released so I can try it.

~~~
jclem
Hi! I just looked and we can't find you on the beta list, for some reason.
Sign up and then DM me when you have (@_clem).

------
colemorrison
This "sounds" interesting, and I'd absolutely love to manage ci/cd in github.
Can anyone point me to some clear docs or articles on its usage? The blog post
and developer guide on actions reads like some hybrid of a marketing page and
a plain index of terms. Most of the examples on workflows/actions
documentation and the like are in HCL which is being deprecated.

~~~
miskander
Once you’re in the beta, you’ll be able to get started by picking from a
varying list of templates. In the meantime, those templates are actually
hosted here: [https://github.com/actions/starter-
workflows](https://github.com/actions/starter-workflows). Depending on what
you’re interested in setting up, this page might be helpful in getting
started. [https://help.github.com/en/categories/automating-your-
workfl...](https://help.github.com/en/categories/automating-your-workflow-
with-github-actions)

------
umvi
I scanned through, but I couldn't see how GitHub Actions supports deployment
to 3rd party platforms like PyPI.

Travis CI has a CLI that allows you to encrypt your PyPI password and stick it
into the Yaml file (I think it works by encrypting your password and then
uploading the decryption key to your Travis account). Will GitHub Actions have
something similar, somehow?

~~~
srmatto
GitHub Actions supports secrets in each Repo. So presumably you could just
expand your secrets at runtime and use a CLI tool to push to PyPI.

------
martin_bech
You lost me at YAML..

~~~
_frkl
What would you like instead? Personally, for those type of things I never
thought yaml was limiting in any way, but would be keen to hear what better
options you think are out there. I like the simplicity and readability of
yaml, as long as there's not too much logic to be expressed.

~~~
alkonaut
I think the future is that all configuration is code. Code in a proper
functional/imperative language (preferably the one you wrote the app code in),
rather than a special declarative language. The attraction of toml is
minimalistic and simple definitions initially - but there is _always_ too much
logic for these languages. If not immediately, then eventually.

"Real" programming languages have good compilers, good error messages,
debuggers, IDE's with syntax highlighters and so on.
json/yaml/toml/xml/whatever always feels like you are poking something and
then trying it, checking for errors from typos and starting over. This feels
quite backwards if you are used to developing with a good strict compiler and
debugger.

There are projects like pulumi that provide API's for multiple languages and
hook into almost any service (e.g. Azure, AWS)

[https://www.pulumi.com/](https://www.pulumi.com/)

~~~
_frkl
Yeah, I know pulumi, and I'm working on something similar myself. Personally,
in my experience, I don't think there's _always_ too much logic, far from it.

A lot of times you really only have a list of tasks that are executed one by
one, and the nature of that doesn't really change. I think it's overkill to
introduce a new wrapping layer in those cases (and that is what Pulumi really
is, it mostly just wraps Terraform if I understand right). But yes, sometimes
it's better to have 'real' code at your disposal. It's just a matter to know
when's when. Like always :-)

Also, debugging those yaml problems or real code doesn't really seem to make a
difference for me. It's both equally annoying, and since there is a
'declarative' layer involved most of the time anyway, just a bit deeper down,
debugging the 'real' issues (not typos and such -- btw. check out yamllint if
you don't know it) is not any easier with wrappers like Pulumi. But maybe we
have just worked on different type of complexities in our pasts. That usually
explains different preferences for tooling. Just saying that this is not a
thing we should/can generalize.

------
tomschlick
Sadly my company's account hasn't been granted access yet :( We are currently
evaluating a switch from our current CI/CD platform and this would have been
perfect. Can't wait for November general availability!

------
thramp
Can GitHub Actions be used on open-source repositories maintained by
organizations?

~~~
0xffff2
When I clicked the link to sign up for the beta, it let me select my personal
account or the one organization account that I own. So based on that I
strongly suspect that the answer is yes.

~~~
thramp
Ah, thanks. Just so happened that I don't have the required admin permissions
to enable Actions on the organization I was interested in.

------
acjohnson55
Considering CircleCI has many more years in operation, are there features and
use cases it supports that GitHub Actions doesn't? Are there ones that GitHub
Actions already supports that CircleCI doesn't?

------
techntoke
GitHub is way late to the game here. I personally have started moving away
from GitHub. They don't even offer an open source version, yet try to claim to
be some gift for open source. GitLab is better, but their architecture is a
bit more complicated than it should be. I really like sites that use Gitea,
but they haven't integrated CI/CD like GitLab, nor have they proven to scale
with their own hosted solution. When I think about the point of these
solutions though, there is a lot of opportunity here. Heck, Git is
decentralized and distributed by itself. Really people just want a place to
manage their issues and MRs, and I hope someone will decentralize that with a
native app and then add additional features that integrate into multiple
providers with ease.

------
jchw
That’s awesome! I’ve always been a big fan of GitLab CI but I’ll have to take
a look at this and see how it stacks up. Competition has proven to be good for
the market of Git hosting platforms.

~~~
jchw
Wait, why’d I get buried for this one? I know it’s against guidelines to
discuss karma but I am just genuinely puzzled and nobody left any comments.

------
hartator
That’s pretty huge. I wonder if it’s possible to have the results committed to
the repository. To be able to display a badge in the readme. Like 87% test
passing.

~~~
nickmerwin
Hi, Coveralls CTO here, the pass/fail status of any commit is shown as a green
check / red x in the commit list and at the top of the repo details page as
the "most recent commit".

As for a % badge, you can use our new Coveralls GitHub Action to post your
coverage data to [https://coveralls.io](https://coveralls.io), then add the
badge to your readme:

[https://github.com/marketplace/actions/coveralls-github-
acti...](https://github.com/marketplace/actions/coveralls-github-action)

------
enlyth
I've been on the wait list for many months and still haven't gotten a chance
to join the limited public beta.

------
austincheney
I remain incredibly happy with Semaphore CI and don't see this as a value
improvement.

~~~
Existenceblinks
I don't love the yaml of its 2.0 version. The visual build steps is horribly
horizontal (why not just wrap it vertically?).

------
aeze
That seems really cool! I wish I wasn't still on the wait list so I could try
it out.

------
nstricevic
It seems to be very expensive. About 6 times more expensive than Semaphore 2.

------
Dirlewanger
CircleCI must be sweating hard. They're probably looking for a buyer.

~~~
dmlittle
They just raised more funding in a Series D[1]. CircleCI isn't the only player
in the space and GitHub entering the playing field doesn't change that either.
There's enough space for a few competitors and having competition will
probably push everyone to build a better product.

[1] [https://circleci.com/blog/we-raised-a-56m-series-d-what-s-
ne...](https://circleci.com/blog/we-raised-a-56m-series-d-what-s-next-for-
circleci-customers/)

------
ZeroCool2u
Very excited to use this for deployment to AppEngine!

------
dmitriz
It is waiting list, not a product.

------
delirehberi
only allowed users by USA

~~~
rurban
Nope, I'm in Germany and I was in the closed beta or quite some time. The UI
improved dramatically in the last months.

------
libria
Github blog [https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-
supports-c...](https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-ci-
cd/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks! We've updated the link from
[https://help.github.com/en/categories/automating-your-
workfl...](https://help.github.com/en/categories/automating-your-workflow-
with-github-actions).

