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Comment by thinkingkong | Hacker News Reader

What I really need is a setup like this with some automated “restore to snapshot” functionality. We use a remote mac mini to do CI on our development environment for new team members. That would be the best.

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I use GitLab CI runner and VirtualBox for ArchMac. Upon CI job submission, on the first run a linked clone of a base VM is started and a snapshot is made, then the job executes inside of it. On subsequent runs the runner starts from the VM snapshot. Concurrency is supported by doing multiple clones.

A blog post is pending bu here's the doc:

[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/osx.html

[1]: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/virtualbox.html

Hello, Community Advocate from GitLab here. Thank you for sharing this info with the community!

We'd love to follow up on your blog post once it's finished. Could you please reach out to us via community@gitlab.com when it's done? Thanks!

That’s a good idea, we’ll see if and how we can add such a feature on dedicated machines.

Cool. Ive done a bunch of research on how. Its just really prohibitive as a customer but super reasonable as a provider. Happy to share.

If I rent a dedicated machine I can certainly do what I described there[0] by hand but would you envision having some kind of turn-key support for GitLab CI runners, supporting both gitlab.com through some partnership and self-hosted instances? That would be brilliant, especially considering Xcode integration with GitLab.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18404893

[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/06/one-click-clone-to-xcode...

CI/CD product manager from GitLab here. We're actually already looking at adding this - we're starting with some experimentation in our internal item at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/infrastructure/issues.... Some folks here at GitLab already have this set up and working at a small scale, so it's certainly possible (with a couple caveats.)

Check out that issue for more info.

Haha seems like you ran into the exact same issues as I did! It works brilliantly with a concurrency of 2 on an early 2015 2-core i5 13" MBP with 16GB of RAM, and I'm even using the machine interactively while builds are processed. I'm using Sierra as a base but I've been building Mavericks, El Capitan and High Sierra ones too. VMs are 1 CPU / 4GB. I saw no gain in bumping up VMs to 2 CPUs.

https://gitlab.com/archmac/packages/pipelines

If you have any advice or learnings for us, feel free to jump into that issue. :)

Not sure I can be more than a data point but hey, whatever. Done ;)

Wanted to share that we developed a GitLab CI Runner/executor for Anka Build and have made it public (It was done for one of our user). It basically enables you to run your iOS/macOS GitLab CI pipelines/jobs on Anka build macOS cloud. You can configure Anka Build macOS cloud on-prem(on macs) or on hosted macs. Happy to share more details.https://github.com/veertuinc/gitlab-runner

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