jenkins-std-lib VS buildkit

> On a previous team I had used Concourse CI to some extent, but I wasn’t really blown away by the experience. Travis and Circle were mentioned. I was a fool. I should have committed to seriously researching some of the contenders and making a more informed decision, but I lacked the willpower and the discernment.

The whole post can be summed up as he had very little CICD experience. Made lots of beginner mistakes, which is easy to do in Jenkins. Then decided to write a post where all his complaints about Jenkins are not only wrong but are the issues that plague all the other CICD tools.

> So instead of writing Bash directly, you’re writing Bash inside Groovy

Why are you doing that? You have a fully featured programming language and you are running `sh('npm install')`. You could do this instead https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib/blob/mast... . How is bash inside of YAML better?

> The trouble is: Groovy is a much, much worse language for executing commands than Bash. Bash is interpreted, has a REPL that is great for experimentation, does require a ton of imports, and has lightweight syntax. Groovy has none of these things.

Groovy has a language server, linters and a vscode IDE plugins. They are probably not as stable or full featured as the bash ones, but they are available and very few take advantage of them. Again, how is YAML+Bash better?

> The way that developers test their Groovy steps is by triggering a job on the remote Jenkins server to run them. The feedback loop is 2 orders of magnitude slower than it is for just executing Bash locally.

This is a rookie mistake. For about 60-75% of pipelines you can run them locally in a docker container on your local machine. You can even set up hot code reload so as you change your pipeline the Jenkins reloads it. You can also configure the job to kick off a build when it reloads the code. When Jenkins is configured correctly it has the fastest feedback loop of any CICD tool on the market. GitHub actions comes in a close second since it can also be run locally but you cant run a "clone" of what you run in production, like having the same secrets, so it gets second place. Beside Jenkins and GitHub actions, I dont know of any solutions for the other tools.

You can run a GitHub action on Jenkins. It's a very deep and complex system. It's like an iceberg and so many engineers dont leave the surface before deciding it sucks and one of the YAML CICD tools is better. Sure the YAML alternatives are EASY to get started with and to do basic stuff with. But they are Terrible at anything complex. While Jenkins is not easy to get started with, once mastered, you can build complex pipelines with ease.

I get that I'm a Jenkins fanboy. Most of the things I mentioned above, I either contribute to or I'm the author of. I know Jenkins has issues. I know it has hurt lots of people, I read the complaints online. But it's still the best out there. The best software in the world is not written in bash or yaml and the same is true of the best CICD pipelines in the world. It's a shame very few people get to see/use those pipelines.

With Jenkins you can still run your favorite GitHub actions. https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib/blob/master/jobs/github/actions/step_example.groovy

This library has a lot of helpful features https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib , one of my favorites is being able to run GitHub actions natively in Jenkins pipelines.

Here is an example using s6 overlay https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib/tree/master/docker/prod

Run a Jenkins locally in docker. I use a vscode dev container for this. https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib/blob/master/.devcontainer/devcontainer.json

I do my best https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib

If you use Jenkins and want to try actions then check out https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib

It let's you run actions on top of Jenkins.

> We are uding docker-in-docker at the moment

You can also run a "less privileged" container with all the features of Docker by using rootless buildkit in Kubernetes. Here are some examples:

https://github.com/moby/buildkit/tree/master/examples/kubern...

https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/examples/kubern...

It's also possible to run dedicated buildkitd workers and connect to them remotely.

- BuildOp evaluates its input as additional LLB operations to add to the graph to allow for dynamic build graphs (also unused in the Dockerfile frontend)

With the Dockerfile Explorer, we run the Dockerfile frontend[1] that BuildKit uses inside of WASM to parse and produce the LLB output locally in your browser. We then embed the Monaco Editor so that you can change your Dockerfile to see how it impacts the LLB output that BuildKit will use to build your Docker image.

You can see a quick video and read more details on how it all works here: https://depot.dev/blog/dockerfile-explorer.

We'd love any feedback or ideas folks would like around this type of tool!

[0] https://github.com/moby/buildkit#exploring-llb

Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):

There's a 2-year-old moby/buildkit GitHub issue about frequent build cache misses when using the BuildKit docker-container driver and multi-stage builds. Anyone else in this sub run into this problem and/or have reasonable workarounds? It seems like something that should come up pretty often.

A couple months ago I encountered a bug in buildkit - when enabling OpenTelemetry tracing, we got occasional panics. With a bit of investigation, we found the cause, fixed and tested in our fork and internal deployments, and pushed to upstream.

I do some search in the internet and there seems to be no good solution, so I just create a feature request: https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3859

Yeah, only Linux containers at the moment, BuildKit is the way we are constructing pipelines and doing caching. Split on if we will support non-linux hosts, but definitely want to find a good solution to not doing Docker-in-Docker.

Relevant issues are https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3011 and https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/1512.