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Comment by ak217 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience GHA far outclasses Jenkins and Travis. After GHA released composable actions (https://github.blog/changelog/2021-08-25-github-actions-redu...), there's not much of a comparison to be made. GitLab is more on par, but the docs are less accessible and they don't seem to have a long-term development strategy the way GHA does.

As far as the limitations in the blog post, they are real, but most of them are limitations in features that are not available to begin with in Jenkins or Travis.

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> GitLab is more on par, but the docs are less accessible and...

Interesting - I find GitLab docs easy to use while I hate GH ones. It takes a long time for me to find the relevant part, even more to determine that this is really all there is, and then some extra to guess which interpretation of the text suits the reality. It has never occured to me that someone might prefer GH docs to GL ones. :)

Composable actions… which must be kept in an entirely separate repository. Yes they technically have the feature now, but that is a really poor showing. I won’t be using it for anything because it takes the CI code away from where it’s being run. It’s a niche for people publishing generic actions eg a language specific cache, but most people are not in the business of producing actions for the marketplace. And I don’t like that it’s one repo per action.

I use a lot of composite actions in the same repo as well as composite actions across repos.

Eg. `workflow1` and `workflow2` both call `composite/action`:

.github/workflows/workflow1.yml

.github/workflows/workflow2.yml

.github/actions/composite/action.yml

The only missing bit in that is a bit more support in a composite action: `if` and a few other keywords. Also, it's a bit annoying to access private across across repos.

I use zero because of all the showstopping bugs and lack of any introspection or input validation. It saves me a lot of time and money.

First, thank you. I have been looking for a way to do this and came to the comments to see if there were workarounds to use composite actions without putting them in a separate repo.

Which brings me the second comment... this is proof the docs suck. I have looked and looked for any evidence that this exact scenario was possible. There are no examples or documentation of this feature anywhere that I could find.

Absolutely agree. Docs are either perfect (5%) or…completely obscure (95%). I can't tell the difference between Github Actions and API documentation in places, but I desire functional examples. No clue where I built it up, but I'm comfortable now…lots of trial and error.

For a lot of Github Actions, I actually follow the Github Roadmap through to implementation as the PRs actually have good examples in them… https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1

Is it still one action per repo?

Nope, I have a repo consuming 10+ workflows, 3 shared actions, and a handful of private workflows (the way private workflows sucks now though, don't recommend–basically just a git clone into your Github Action).

This is all non-Enterprise, private repos, no clue in GHEC/S.

> GitLab is more on par

On par? Gitlab CI is lightyears ahead of GHA and shows no sign of stopping: child pipelines, dynamic pipeline generation, very flexible conditionals, composable pipeline definitions, security, merge trains.

GHA is very basic, even simplest thing like individual job restart is not implemented.

GHA definitely far outclasses Jenkins and Travis.

However, having also used Buildkite, I'm not sure I could go back to GHA - it's slightly nicer to target, and at least as large a step towards reliability & predictability as Travis -> GHA was.

I use Buildkite all day as part of my job, and I have to say, it's amazing. The company is great to work with, the product is highly flexible for a variety of complex build workflows teams want to implement, and has scaled beautifully for 1000+ concurrent build machines split between on-prem and cloud. No affiliation, just a customer.

My company uses GitLab CI/CD, and I've tried to set up GitHub actions on a personal repo. I've found GitLab's docs to be excellent. GitHub was a bit more confusing, but I got there in the end.

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