Travis merges private and open source repositories into one platform | Hacker News Reader

Travis merges private and open source repositories into one platform

blog.travis-ci.com

116 pointsrobinhood41 comments

Hello, Josh from Travis CI here.

We are happy to announce that you can now run open source projects on travis-ci.com. At the moment you can only add and activate repositories which haven't been tested on travis-ci.org. We are hard at work to add a way for you to migrate your projects from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com, and should have more information to share on this soon.

If you have any questions I would be happy to help answer them here, or you can email our team at support@travis-ci.com

Thanks for Travis.

It's great and it's is really useful, at least for our open sources project.

Thanks for using and trusting us :)

This is somewhat related, but you mention the transition to GitHub Apps in your blog post. For those of us already using Travis via GitHub Services, what's the right way to transition to GitHub Apps?

When you go to your settings you can 'activate and migrate' your user account or organization accounts to GitHub Apps. We will switch your service hooks to GitHub App service hooks in the process. Our support team is also more than happy to help :) support@travis-ci.com

Thanks Josh! I've received your email announcing this move but honestly I didn't understand at first - I had to read the blog post to understand what that meant.

It makes sense that you wanted to maintain a single platform instead of two. The only worry that I have is the following.

At work we are using private repositories on travis-ci.com, but we've noticed some noticeable downtimes over the past year, whereas my open source repositories, including a popular one, which run on travis-ci.org, have their build processes actually way faster and more reliable (I actually haven't noticed any significant downtimes).

I don't know if it's just an impression that I have or if it's something that more people have noticed. I really hope that merging the two platforms will let you provide an even better for both pro and open source users.

Thank you for Travis - many open source projects would be worst without it.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry for the downtime issues you have experienced lately. I'll follow up with the team on this to understand some of the affected your projects.

This single platform change will allow us to better focus on speed improvements for all users.

Thank you for using and trusting us :)

Hey Josh, biggest issue I run into is not being able to CI forks of projects, any chance this could work in future?

This should work, if you email support@travis-ci.com we can look into it for you.

Don't fork via github and just push the code to a new repo and you can add CI to that.

Edit: Or maybe that's the workaround for coverity-scan, I don't remember.

Hey Josh,

This is unrelated, but since you're here: any chance of Travis rolling out newer versions of Ubuntu?

We use Travis to test Kubernetes apps with minikube, which will stop being possible soon when minikube stops supporting systems that don't run systemd/journalctl[0].

[0]: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/issues/2704

Thanks for the ping about this. Could you email support@travis-ci.com and we can look into this for you. Feel free to also mention that we chatted here.

This is a weird thing to say, surely you already have enough information to look into the problem. At least you were gracious enough to let them mention the chat though.

Not for me to say, but I suspect the issue is more that they want an internal ticket to ensure the issue doesn't get forgotten. Asking for an email will mean that it goes through their normal support channels. FWIW, I've gotten really good service asking about edge cases like this in the past.

Perhaps it's still not decided, but are you going to move all the build history from travic-ci.org to travis-ci.com? Can you add an automatic redirect from the old URL to the new URL?

I have a few links that say "... an it's good enough to pass all the test in Travis CI", "... but it fails miserably in the test in Travis CI".

That is the plan, move and redirect. That work is in the works. We will have more blog post on this soon :)

As for the links, can you send more info to support@travis-ci.com and we can look into this.

I was not clear. The link is ok, travis is ok, the code in my commit is wrong :).

Hey Josh,

An unrelated request: We’ve been waiting for a response to https://github.com/travis-ci/apt-package-whitelist/issues/19... for almost 2.5 years now, and no human ever looked at it. Is there anything we missed? Anywhere we should’ve also registered this request?

Thanks

I'm sorry for this long wait, this needs to be addressed. I'd love to find the right person to look into this, if you can email support and mention me (Josh) I can see if we can provide you an answer to this.

Is there any difference between the two services now? Or are they going to be merged under a single domain?

This sounds nice, but what about supporting operating systems besides for Linux and MacOS? A big part of using continuous integration is being able to test your code on the various platforms you deploy on. People have been asking for FreeBSD support since 2014[1] and Windows support since 2011[2]. For lots of projects not having Windows or FreeBSD support makes Travis CI not even an option for a CI tool. And from the outside looking in, it seems the Travis CI team doesn't care about adding support for other operating systems, it's been 7 years since the windows support issue was opened and there appears to be no progress.

[1]: https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/1818 [2]: https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/216

Thanks for the feedback. I can promise you we are looking into this, and hope to have updates on these issues in the near future :)

Another way to look at this is that it has created an opening for competitors to fill that gap, especially appveyor, circleci, and codeship.

That TravisCI is still the market leader in the cloud CI space suggests that they're making the right call by letting others pick up the more niche parts of the market.

> That TravisCI is still the market leader in the cloud CI space suggests that they're making the right call by letting others pick up the more niche parts of the market.

Windows is one third of the server market and over 90% of the desktop market. Calling Windows a niche is simply wrong.

How many of those Windows servers are only running Exchange and Active Directory and nothing else? If I had to guess, I'd say 70% or more but maybe someone else has better estimates.

70%+ is probably accurate if you include the whole microsoft enterprise ecosystem (sharepoint etc in addition to what you mentioned)

windows is definitely a minority in web hosting

Depends on your perspective, I suppose. But I was just talking to a web- and app-based service company that started on the Microsoft stack circa 2001. They're migrating away from it partly because of tech issues, but mainly because it's much harder to hire people.

If you look at yesterday's "who's hiring" post, it's way, way less than a third of positions that are using Windows server technologies.

The windows devs I know just use whatever comes from Microsoft and are not interested in anything else. They believe Microsoft has the best tech :)

> That TravisCI is still the market leader in the cloud CI space

Is it?

I'm working on a platform which uses KVM and can run builds on pretty much any platform you want. It's still in alpha but if anyone wants to try it please reach out; email's in my profile.

Docs: https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/

Sample build: https://builds.sr.ht/job/2677

You plan on turning this into an actual service? BTW looks nice, I'll check it out when I get home. I like that your able to do this by your self but Travis CI can't with significantly more resources then you.

>You plan on turning this into an actual service?

Yes, but I'm taking my time and rolling it out slowly. It's used in production by a handful people for various projects, but it's lacking a lot of polish.

I'm still assuming it's been less then the 4 years since FreeBSD support was brought up and the 7 years since Windows support was brought up on Travis CI's issue tracker. But either way nice work.

The less developers cater to Windows, the better. Remember that usually it's the other way around, Windows receives support from driver/software developers, and it's seen by most as a feature of Windows. At any rate, Windows is a subpar choice for any server needs, so it's for the better.

> At any rate, Windows is a subpar choice for any server needs, so it's for the better.

This is simply not true. While I prefer a FreeBSD or Linux server to a Windows server, saying Windows is a subpar choice for all server needs is disingenuous and wrong. What if I need to run software on a server that only runs on Windows or I can only get commercial support from the vendor on Windows? Clearly Windows in the better server choice if it's the only operating system that can run the software I need. The UNIX == Good and Windows == Bad meme needs to die. Use the best tool for the job, sometimes that's a Unix OS sometimes it's Windows.

This doesn't mean that Windows is better, it just means you have no other choice because you were forced to by a vendor who didn't provide a native Linux binary.

Better software support does make Windows better in that circumstance. It doesn't matter what features or strengths Linux has over Windows if I can't run the software I need.

I don't think I fully understand: for open-source repos, does it only mean that the Travis-CI domain will change from .org to .com? Or are there some extra features on .com which will become available to me after the migration?

Travis CI will become one platform later this year. We will have more to share on this move soon. Until then everything will work as is, and we will continue to support open source on travis-ci.com going forward. Software development is something we love, and we will to continue to help the community build better software :)

Uh; still not sure, but given no clear "extra features" confirmation, I guess this means just a domain name change for end-users (?). Unless the "more to share" is a cryptic allusion to potentially some new features? But super vague if so.

Agree, GP is sort of a non-answer. As an open source user of Travis, I am confused too.

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