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).<p>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.<p>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.
This is great news for developers. The trend has been to combine version control and CI for years now. For a timeline see <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/2019/08/08/built-in-ci-cd-version-control-secret/" rel="nofollow">https://about.gitlab.com/2019/08/08/built-in-ci-cd-version-c...</a><p>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 <a href="https://circleci.com/blog/we-raised-a-56m-series-d-what-s-next-for-circleci-customers/" rel="nofollow">https://circleci.com/blog/we-raised-a-56m-series-d-what-s-ne...</a> 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).<p>It is interesting that a lot of the things GitHub is shipping is already part of Azure DevOps <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-dotnet-webapp" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-...</a> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Every time I try to use actions I'm surprised it was launched in it's current obscure, unpolished state.
As a Gitlab user that's not strongly committed to the platform, this looks like a pretty interesting option.<p>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.<p>Seems like you can do things like build your Docker containers (<a href="https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-actions/creating-a-docker-container/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-actions...</a>).<p>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.
If you're curious about the platforms they have: <a href="https://help.github.com/en/articles/software-in-virtual-environments-for-github-actions" rel="nofollow">https://help.github.com/en/articles/software-in-virtual-envi...</a>
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.
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"
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.<p>Anyone know?
I couldn't quickly find out if these features are now supported but what I really want is:<p>- Actions can fail, but still continue (more like an additional success/failure status)<p>- Manually triggered actions (maybe with parameters that need to be entered by the user)<p>- Artifacts attached to actions especially HTML reports (next to plain text, this is the universal output type for a lot of quality tools)
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.
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.
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.
<a href="https://twitter.com/anoff_io/status/1159512381728407552" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/anoff_io/status/1159512381728407552</a><p>True? microsoft person on stage <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/author/jeremy-eplingoutlook-com/" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/author/jeremy-eplingou...</a><p>Sorry Github! Not good!
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.<p>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?
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 <a href="https://github.com/features/actions" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/features/actions</a>:<p>“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
I work for Codefresh a CI/CD solution for Kubernetes/Helm/Docker.<p>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.<p><a href="https://steps.codefresh.io/" rel="nofollow">https://steps.codefresh.io/</a><p>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).<p>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.
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.
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.<p>I am mostly just excited for it to be released so I can try it.
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.
I scanned through, but I couldn't see how GitHub Actions supports deployment to 3rd party platforms like PyPI.<p>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?
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Github blog <a href="https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-ci-cd/" rel="nofollow">https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-c...</a>