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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

It seems GitLab CI/CD is beating Travis CI on pretty much every metric now, except the weirdness of only using GitLab for CI/CD and not code hosting, if you prefer to use GitHub for that. Am I missing something?

(GitLab supports using its CI/CD on a non-GitLab repo just fine, but it can cause some initial confusion.)

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External Gitlab CI is funny because requires you to replicate the repo to their side and then glue everything together (build status, PRs, etc) by yourself

Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user).

For a simple 10 person team, that's 200$ a month. Exclusively to get access to repository replication !!

I have my own runners, so there's no reason to pay for the paid plan. I just end up hacking around some replication script.

See https://medium.com/@PedroGomes/mirror-repository-to-gitlab-f...

> Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user).

It looks like "pull" replication is available on the $4/mo. plan, per their documentation.

Interesting. I didn't realize you can use GitLab CI/CD on non-GitLab repo. Do you happen to have a documentation on this (my searches came up empty)?

Right here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/githu...

Travis CI has unique feature - support for ARMv8, PowerPC, and SystemZ build environments. GitHub doesn't have this multiplatform building environment.

https://github.com/uraimo/run-on-arch-action

It's on qemu, not that fast but it works.

You still can use that for free if you disable osx and not use too many parallel build jobs. I just removed all of the osx jobs from all my repos. Even a PR can trigger that new pricing model.

Is GitLab CI/CD substantially better than GitHub Actions, do you know?

From my experience of using both I prefer Github actions and consider it better. Person opinion and experience of using both.

I've used both, and it seems like both work equally well for the way I want to use it. I prefer to use GitLab because it's open source. Admittedly I haven't used the open source version of GitLab much, but it's nice to know that it's there. It includes CI/CD:

> CI/CD is a part of both the open source GitLab Community Edition and the proprietary GitLab Enterprise Edition

https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/continuous-...

As I start to use more advanced features of CI/CD, I might get a better idea of how they compare. I am aware that GitHub Actions has a marketplace but I don't really want to set up my builds that way. I would rather write the steps myself, pulling in docker images and packages from package managers like npm, PyPI, and apt as needed.

From my experience, writing a custom driver for GitLab Runner is a lot easier, if you need to support custom setup.

They also differentiate heavily on how they work. With GitLab, if you for example want to run jobs on ephemeral KVM virtual machines, you would have an agent on host machine (or multiple of them), which would then receive a job, spawn VM, execute commands in it, and at the end terminate it.

With GitHub, you would have to spawn VMs in advance, and launch their agent in each of them. When agent dies, you will have to manually kill the VMs, and spawn a new one.

This means that there is no easy way to have VMs spawn on demand, or to spawn different VMs with different configurations depending on job label.

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