gitlab-ci-local VS github-workflows-kt

Among these options, the one that has gained the most traction is gitlab-ci-local :

The main reason behind this change is to have consistent scripts for local testing and remote runners during testing and debugging. However, there are already tools available, such as gitlab-ci-local, that allow you to run jobs locally, partially invalidating this argument. Additionally, working locally may not provide access to all necessary variables.

Two tools I've used for local Gitlab CI runs: - https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local - https://gitlab.com/AdrianDC/gitlabci-local

What you might want to look at is this, to meet both needs https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local exists but its not quite there yet. Personally Ive resorted to setting up a self-managed instance at home, relying on the included linter/validator and pushing repeatedly as before.

If you already have/had a working pipeline then maybe https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local has something worth looking at.

> One thing that would be nice, however, would be the ability to run the entire pipeline locally.

This cost me many hours of waiting for the Gitlab CI runner when debugging non-trivial pipelines, when the issue was something that did not have to do with the script steps inside of the jobs but rather how the Gitlab runner handled things.

I've found gitlab-ci-local [1] which actually does run the Gitlab pipeline locally, although I had to write some boilerplaye scripts to set up all the necessary 'CI_FOO_SOMETHING' environment variables before running the tool. (Which sometimes came back to bite me because the issue was actually in the content of some of those environment variables). It's still a very good tool.

[1] https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

Most CI/CD tools let you run pipelines locally. Just one example: https://circleci.com/blog/using-runner-for-local-testing/ . In my opinion Gitlab and Circleci have the test tools for this.

We use Kotlin to generate the yaml for our github actions: https://github.com/typesafegithub/github-workflows-kt

Nothing like a good old type safe compiled language to cut down on the verbosity, copy paste usage, silly syntax errors, weird undocumented you just have to know the magical incantations, etc. Kotlin or similar languages are the way to go. Much safer, more compact, easier to cut down on the copy paste reuse (which is just miserable drudgery), easy to introduce some sane abstractions where that makes sense. You get auto completion. And if it compiles, it's likely to just work.

People keep on moving around the deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic when it comes to configuration languages. Substituting yaml for json or toml just moves the problems. And substituting those with XML just introduces other issues and only marginally improves things. Well formed xml is nice. But so is well formed json. Schemas help, if the urls don't 404 and you have tools that can actually do something with them. Which, as it turns out is mostly not a thing in practice. And without that, it's just repetitive bloat. XML with schemas becomes very hard to read quickly.

There's a reason, people started ignoring XML once json became popular: json does most of the essential stuff well enough that XML just isn't worth the effort. And if you have something where you'd actually need the complexity of XML, it's likely to be some really ugly bloated kind of thing where the last thing you'd want to do is edit it manually.

I've dealt with cloudformation in XML form at some point in my life. It sucks. Not just a little bit. It's an absolute piss poor format for a thing like that. Since such a thing was lacking at the time, we ended up actually building our own little tools to generate that xml. Hand editing it was just too painful. One mistake could corrupt your entire stack. And it takes ages to find out if you actually got it right. In Json form it's hardly any better. It's just one of those convoluted over-engineered things. Anyway, Json support for cloudformation was not there at the time and the difference is like asking whether you'd preferred to be shot or stabbed. It's going to suck either way.

github-workflows-kt is a tool for creating GitHub Actions workflows in a type-safe script, helping you to build robust workflows for your GitHub projects without mistakes, with pleasure, in Kotlin.

The github-workflows-kt project uses Kotlin scripting, and it recommends doing everything using main.kts, because it's easier.

I use matrix tests with github actions to test my kt-search client with different versions of elastisearch and opensearch. Pretty easy to set up: https://github.com/jillesvangurp/kt-search/blob/master/.gith...

Basically it fires up elasticsearch using docker-compose and then the integration tests run against that. You could use a similar strategy to test different feature flag combinations.

For some of our private projects, we use kts to generate the github action yaml files using this: https://github.com/krzema12/github-workflows-kt

Well worth checking out if you have more complex workflows. Yaml is just horrible in terms of copy paste reuse. Also nice to get some compile time safety and auto complete with our action files.

One of my team members, Nikky, got annoyed with the verbosity and insane amount of copy-paste reuse needed to drive Github Actions. And true to her nature, promptly fixed it by using and contributing to GitHub Actions Kotlin DSL

GitHub: https://github.com/krzema12/github-actions-kotlin-dsl