There’s a lot of confident people in this thread saying CI is easy if you “just” make it dumb and keep all the logic in scripts that you farm out to.
My experience is this works for simple scripts but immediately falls apart when you start to do things like “don’t run the entire battery of integration tests against a readme
change”, or “run two builds in parallel”, or “separate the test step from the build and parallelise it even if the build is serial”.
It’s easy to wrap make build and go about your life, but that’s no easier than just using the GitHub action to call go build or mvn build. T
he complexity comes in “pull that dependency from this place that is in a private repository on GitHub/AWS because it’s 100x faster than doing it from its source”, and managing the credentials etc for all of that stuff. This is also where the “it differs from running locally” comes into it too, funnily enough.
My experience is this works for simple scripts but immediately falls apart when you start to do things like “don’t run the entire battery of integration tests against a readme change”, or “run two builds in parallel”, or “separate the test step from the build and parallelise it even if the build is serial”.
It’s easy to wrap make build and go about your life, but that’s no easier than just using the GitHub action to call go build or mvn build. T
he complexity comes in “pull that dependency from this place that is in a private repository on GitHub/AWS because it’s 100x faster than doing it from its source”, and managing the credentials etc for all of that stuff. This is also where the “it differs from running locally” comes into it too, funnily enough.