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Comment by mococa | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I keep my projects on it is the Windows and macOS runners.

Not saying it doesn't come with downsides and the hassle of maintenance, but at home I have a Linux server (running a Windows VM) + Mac Mini + Forgejo + Forgejo workers on each one of them. With NixOS it was relatively painless to get setup correctly, everything in a reproducible manner, and now I can have a ~10 line YAML file that adds cross-platform builds+signing+publishing when needed, and performance is much better than the free/cheap CI workers you get from Microsoft and others.

Last time I looked into self hosting Windows CI, it seemed like everything kind of expected you to install all your tools ahead of time, rather than anything containerised. I assume Nix helps with that? Are there any docs you can point me at?

https://github.com/highpost/forgejo-appliance

They’re free, too. If your project is public, you can spin up dozens (hundreds?) of jobs (10 or so of which will run in parallel) on every push and Microsoft casually pays for it. I’d love to move off GH but I would have to significantly reduce my CI usage (before you ask - already more optimized than anything you usually see) or pay quite a lot for my hobby projects.

Genuine question: Have you considered moving to your own server?

I ran Forejo for a bit, but I made the mistake of trying to use Jenkins for CI, which is very annoying for someone who really doesn't doesn't enjoy devops work.

I have - both considered it and actually did it for a while.

A few years, one hack, and a couple of apartment changes later, my server is behind on maintenance and lying somewhere waiting for me to set it up and update it. Meanwhile, my free action workflows just keep working. On a good day, at least - Microsoft’s SLA is like one 9 and it’s on the wrong side of the comma.

I have one of those free Oracle cloud instances with 24 gigs of RAM; I've considered hosting there, but for now I just use Sourcehut.

There definitely is value in "it's hosted somewhere that's not my house" though.

24 GB does sound pretty sweet. I’ll check if they still offer that, thanks. The price of having to accept an Oracle EULA might just be higher than anything else mentioned thus far, though.

Remember that your free server can be deleted without notice if Oracle needs the capacity. Always have a current backup.

Or silently downgraded, as it appears that Oracle now only offers 2 Arm OCPUs and 12 GB RAM.

might be a silly question, but isn't macos relatively easily virtualisable? i understand it's not done commercially bc of licensing issues, but is there a piece of software where you just get a vps or two and virtualise all of your build targets yourself, so your ci bill is just the vps bill?

Virtualizing macOS on non-Apple hardware is illegal. That, and in between the costs of hardware (even assuming I breach their licence and go non-Apple) and the costs of electricity, this quickly becomes a sizeable time and cash investment.

VPS bills accumulate. I must have saved hundreds or thousands of dollars by not hosting this myself over the years.

Yeah I think people vastly underestimate the value of free CI runners - especially free Windows/Mac runners. Big projects with dozens of members can afford the effort to set up their own runners but small one-man projects aren't going to bother and they represent the vast majority of Github.

Microsoft spends around $100m/year on free CI runners. Github is going to have to get a lot worse before most people give that up.

Also the post correctly mentions the importance of stacked PRs and how it's crazy that it has taken Github this long to get them. But it fails to mention that it's taking its competitors even longer. Gitlab doesn't have them. Forgejo has no plans. The only other forges I know that support them are Phabricator/Phorge (I think anyway; it's been a while), and Tangled, which tbh looks like it has blown its weirdness budget way too much to be a viable Github competitor.

I think Codeberg offers free CI as long as your project is aimed at improving the free software world and you don't abuse server resources (as evaluated by a human in each individual case). That's one of their selling points over and above git hosting.

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