Saturday, November 29, 2014

Re-look at circleci

Recently got an email from circleci.com announcing that they were changing some of their pricing models effectively making OpenSource projects free to run on circleci. Well let me just directly quote them:

While on the free plan you can run 1 build for private repositories and 3 builds for public repositories simultaneously. All other builds will queue and run once the earlier ones finish. You can always add additional containers to run more builds simultaneously or take advantage of parallelism and get your test suite running faster.

For the full link to their announcement fly on here


On the band wagon I was in less than 2 seconds. I had to scratch that niggling itch I had initially of not being able to get it to work with Radpath, my Elixir baby.

I am glad I did. There are some things I really like about it:

  1. The main thing. Cache folders period. The ability for me to set cache folders greatly cuts down on the time it takes to run tests. For Radpath, it completed first way ahead of Travis and Drone. This to me is the main reason I started paying attention again.
  2. Ability to let you open up a ssh session to check on running test by just the flick on an option. It's slightly rough and induced a few minutes of head scratching, but I am glad this is there.
  3. Parallelism sounds just great to me, and I am itching to try this feature next. 
  4. The configuration file does not require you to understand rocket science and is pretty much self explanatory. See below
  5. Great support. I got personal emails from some of their devels even though I was still pretty much a freeloader up until now. 
Check out the sample configuration file below:



For those running Elixir projects, you can use my ci scripts as a sample:

https://github.com/lowks/Radpath/

They do support quite a wide range of languages out of the gate:
  1. Ruby/Rails
  2. Python
  3. Node.js
  4. PHP
  5. Java and even
  6. Haskell
Other languages you can still get at it using custom installations
So, yes second time around testing with CircleCI, they have got my attention. I am curious to see what they are up to next. Try it, who knows you might just be pleasantly surprised. Happy CI-ing!


2 comments:

ionelmc said...

Parallelism doesn't seem to be available for the free/opensource plans ...

lowkster said...

ionelmc, yeah you are right. It seems when I increase to >1 it is asking me to pay.