dosisod
Joined 4 years ago
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127
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38
Member since
Aug 10
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Creator of Cicada here. I created a new DSL because I wanted a more declarative, expressive, yet capable file format, something like Dockerfile but with programming capabilities. In terms of "just running commands", Python (or any other language) is just as good if not better.
Where Cicada shines though is that it makes higher level concepts like conditional execution and caching front end center, so you can describe more with less lines. The DSL itself isn't very mature at the moment, but I plan on adding stuff like allow/deny capabilities and more in the future.
Comment · 3 years ago
Creator of Cicada here. I mentioned this in another thread, but I have an experimental "GitHub Actions to Cicada" converter tool I'm working on that makes it easier to import GHA workflows to Cicada. GitHub already has an importer tool to import other git providers to GHA, but of course they don't have any export features.
Like you said, there are lots of intricate details you need to get right, and each CI/CD provider has a different ethos about how CI should be done. What I'm trying to do with Cicada is create one workflow format that gives you the power of GitHub Actions with their numerous event triggers, but make it work for other providers like Gitlab. Having one format that works with many providers is better than converting multiple formats back and forth, IMO.
Comment · 3 years ago
Nice product! I haven't heard of Garden until now.
Adding a CLI for Cicada has been on my todo list for a while, and is long overdue! This should be easy enough to do.
Comment · 3 years ago
Creator of Cicada here. Currently I am using GitHub SSO to reduce spam for the logins. When installing Cicada locally though you need to create an admin account, though there is no way (in the UI) to create new local users. Adding more sign-in methods (ie Gitlab, Bitbucket) is definitely on my radar.
Comment · 3 years ago
Creator of Cicada here. Thank you for these questions! I'll try and answer them all:
0: Secrets are stored using Vault. Read this commit message [1] for a full breakdown.
1: Currently you cannot include other .ci files. I have been in feature creep mode for months now, and I've been forcing myself to stop adding features and start talking to users. The goal is to make Cicada more or less a general purpose programming language, but the first step is making it work well for defining CI/CD workflows.
2: If it is necessary, I could back-port the self-hosted runners to Python 3.10/3.9 or earlier. And, since the runner interface just uses websockets, I (or someone else) could make a runner in a different language, ie Rust or Go.
3: There is a "event" global variable that includes info like "event.branch", which is the branch that was pushed, but it does not include stuff like the default branch. Currently you could do `on git.push where event.branch is "main"`, but something like "event.branch is event.default_branch" would be even better. I'll work on adding that.
The value add currently is that Cicada is FOSS, platform agnostic (works with GitHub/Gitlab), and uses a language that consolidates the workflows and scripts into one manageable file format. Existing CI systems are already packed with features that people expect, so the current struggle is catching up to this and then adding more on top of that. I'm trying to focus on what sets Cicada apart: That it gives you more control over your workflows, while being expressive and easier to manage then YAML and shell scripts.
[1]: https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada/commit/2659f79b500...
Comment · 3 years ago
Thank you for the feedback. What in particular is making it hard to start trying it out? I'm curious because lowering the barrier for entry is important for getting people to start using this.
To your last point, I have experience with using CD in production, but not to the scale where I have builds stepping over each other and causing issues. I agree that serial builds are important in this case, and is something that I will need to look into (conceptually it sounds pretty simple).