We've recently started building standalone binaries which should lower the barrier to entry. Concourse itself has never been too tightly coupled to BOSH, it's just been the quickest feedback loop for us during development, so it ended up being the first thing we documented, primarily for internal use as we haven't really "launched" yet.
Binaries are available for download in the GitHub releases[1]. Check the README.md[2] for details. We'll be launching 1.0 very soon and part of this will include a major docs/website revamp which promotes the binaries to the "main stage". It also switches to BOSH 2.0, which drastically simplifies the deployment configuration necessary, but it still takes a backseat to the lower-upfront-cost distribution formats in the new site.
Glad you liked Concourse otherwise, and hopefully this helps. :)
Does this mean it will be (is?) possible to deploy Concourse on a single machine without the headache of BOSH Lite? I've wanted to use Concourse, but when all you've got is a Mac Mini, doing a full BOSH deploy (or even BOSH Lite) is quite a big ask.
Yup (is). You'd just run `concourse web` and then `concourse worker` on the same machine. If all you have is a Mac Mini there's one gotcha, though: currently none of the resources will run on OS X, as they're built as Docker images. So you'll still need at least one Linux worker somewhere.
I think the next step from us may be to start building Vagrant boxes that just spin up a worker, parameterized with credentials to register with a Concourse `web` instance. That way you can run Concourse on OS X for iOS testing/etc. and still have all your resources and Linux containerization when you need it via a tiny local VM.
The main value we get from it is having a nice Go API and not having to overhaul everything using Garden every time some shiny new container tech comes out.
We've recently started building standalone binaries which should lower the barrier to entry. Concourse itself has never been too tightly coupled to BOSH, it's just been the quickest feedback loop for us during development, so it ended up being the first thing we documented, primarily for internal use as we haven't really "launched" yet.
Binaries are available for download in the GitHub releases[1]. Check the README.md[2] for details. We'll be launching 1.0 very soon and part of this will include a major docs/website revamp which promotes the binaries to the "main stage". It also switches to BOSH 2.0, which drastically simplifies the deployment configuration necessary, but it still takes a backseat to the lower-upfront-cost distribution formats in the new site.
Glad you liked Concourse otherwise, and hopefully this helps. :)
[1]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/releases [2]: https://github.com/concourse/bin/blob/master/README.md