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Comment by markovbot | Hacker News Reader

This UI is beautiful. I hope GitLab looks into implementing something similar. Their CI is already so powerful, it would be great to be able to have a UI to build pipelines.

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I'd rather describe workflows in files (s.a .circleci/config.yml) which are diff-able, copy-able, shareable and live happily in repositories. UI could be built from there to show me the flow (again, like in the appealing circlci dashboard).

The docs[0] state that the workflows live in `.github/main.workflow` and you can use the visual editor or edit them manually

[0]: https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-workflows/crea...

Thanks for you kind words about GitLab CI. What are the things that a visual editor is really great at? Getting a good overview of the relations between tasks? Seeing what secrets are available?

I am a very visual person. The first step before I start writing a workflow in gitlab is, that I draw the whole pipeline on a whiteboard as a tree/graph. We discuss it with the team and only then I start writing the .gitlab-ci.yml file.

Having something digital to substitute the whiteboard would be fantastic. Not just for designing the pipeline, but also for seeing the results of an actual run of the pipeline.

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for writing it up.

I've been just draw a .gitlab-ci.yml file with random sleeps. Hell, I might expand upon that and make the sleeps sorta simulate the real thing but on a faster timescale for demo purposes.

Sorry for being a little off-topic, but speaking of GitLab CI's, I really wish Auto DevOps wouldn't be enabled by default/mysteriously when there's no .gitlab-ci.yml and it hasn't been manually enabled. You end up with the red 'build: failed' icon which appears to be impossible to delete/hide even if you disable Pipelines under project permissions and disable everything under CI/CD.

I believe one thing that cause it is changing a repo from private to public without unchecking Pipelines permission (enabled by default). The new GitLab profile pages looks absolutely gorgeous, but I suspect many will be turned off by the highly visible 'build: failed' icons next to the repos, even if those repos contain nothing but a JSON file.. I personally had to resort to deleting the repo and creating a new one to get rid of it. And on that note, clicking on the '/users/username/projects?limit=10&page=2' next button results in the Overview tab turning blank.

Mmm, I agree that if Auto DevOps runs once, fails, and is disabled it shouldn't show a failed icon. Anyone that has a link to an issue or fix?

That is weird behavior. Here's an issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/52778

FWIW, if you disable Pipelines and push another commit to the repo, you'll clear the failed icon from the project page. The project page only shows the last commit and the failed status is associated with the specific commit, not the project as a whole.

The profile page, however, doesn't seem to update. My guess is that it's a caching problem. I've logged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/52780 for this.

Also created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/52779 to discuss not making Auto DevOps pipelines show failure at all.

Just another kind comment for GitLab CI: we deployed it on prem and built a whole data analysis and quality tracking system for a clinical trial on top. I know it’s not the most powerful thing out there but for our small deadline-ridden team the comprehensive and all in one nature + on-prem is just awesome.

Wow that's awesome! Can you share any more about the system you built?

It’s a statistic model for epilepsy. We have GitLab running alongside dedicated NFS server for the data, build Docker images with the code, run them with access to the data, and put quality control images and reports on GitLab CI as artifacts. Each patient gets a branch, triggers CI runner generating patient reports. It took a while to figure it out but it’s really good for a dev team lacking in discipline ;)

That is awesome, thanks for sharing.

Awesome! Have you looked at our Meltano project for data?

Briefly but the ETL stuff a little enterprisey for me. The ability to incorporate notebooks as part of the workflow definitely looks interesting, but I don’t think the heavy data sets we have would warehouse well in PostGres, we would need blobs or an NFS filer anyhow.

I think it would be amazing if gitlab had a visual editor for one time runs. Like, "rerun this one step in the pipeline as if this was this new yaml". Would prevent the annoying aspect of building a pipeline, which is when your 3rd, 4th step, etc. Isn't correct, and you have to edit the yaml and wait for steps 1 and 2 every single change.

Thanks for the suggestions. It would be great to have more details about it. Could you please open a feature proposal about that over at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues? We'd love to follow up on it.

As you may have guessed there is already an issue for that:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21485

Think it'll be as slow using a cough interpreted language?

Workflows are typically I/O bound (where I/O == tasks that are executed). In most cases they tend to include little or no actual computation. So the raw computation speed is of little consequence, and an interpreted approach is fine.

Implementations of workflow languages optimised for compute performance (e.g. using JIT compilation) do exist, but are not widely used outside of situations where the workflow combines both compute-intensive work and coordination of external tasks.

Yeah it looks really beautiful. Something like this open sourced would be great to build workflow builders into custom software.

UI would be amazing (and presumably this puts pressure on GitLab to invest in it).

The Actions UI is going to be huge for user adoption.

I can't say how many commits I had of various .gitlab-ci.yml files with just tiny changes in each one.

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