Gitea and Drone.io

November 9, 2018 by
Filed under: Configuration Management, Development, Projects 

Recently I’ve been frustrated at work while using Gitlab and Jenkins for various reasons, some of the integrations are really fragile due to some plugins we use, both Jenkins and Gitlab are incredibly bloated and use insane amounts of resources and they are simply not reasonable choices for a private setup. Also I recently replaced my server at home (basically a machine that does almost everything I want at home) from a 32 bit atom to an I5 intel machine with 16 gigs of RAM etc, which means I have totally different resources to work with. For example, 32 bit i386 cpu’s are not supported out of the box by docker, and the cpu was quite overloaded. With the new box I’ve been able to play around a little with my setup.

I’ve previously used just a basic and manual git setup at home, with approximately 110’ish repositories in it. I’ve been playing around with gitea and drone.io at home with the new server and am very pleased with it, even though it took a bit of work to get used to it. In all honesty, I’ve only done fairly basic work with it so far. The only really complex stuff I’ve done was to move my existing git repositories into the gitea environment by scripting a bit and using the gitea web based API.

Regarding gitea, so far I’ve noticed the following things:

  • Very slim by comparison to other options, currently uses around 60 MB of RAM and not a lot of CPU from what I’ve seen. Especially considering what you get.
  • UI is fairly similar to gitlab/github.
  • Setup was very simple except for database connection (I winded up just using sqlite3 I believe, I was lazy and also don’t expect more than a very few users).
  • Pull Request is really nice.
  • Issue tracking seems to work fairly well.
  • Docker setup with volumes is very easy.
  • Seems to have the essentials in plugins etc that I need.
  • API seems very nice, I’ve only used it for the migration so far though.
  • The only bad part I’ve seen so far is that the administration panel might be a bit spartan at times, but I don’t really mind.

Regarding drone.io, my first impressions are:

  • I absolutely love the yaml file format so far.
  • UI is incredibly clean, on the verge of too clean.
  • Integration with gitea was super simple once I actually got it working (documentation was not 100% accurate I think).
  • Simple to get started with if you have a sane build pattern.
  • Nice integration to gitea and you get marks on build statuses etc. Interesting to find if you can block a build from being merged based on build results as well.
  • I’ve managed to make a simple build of a playground project I have by adding a Dockerfile which is built into an image when the build is started, then a continuation of the build builds my project inside the docker image we just built.
  • First time using docker-compose so it was a bit of a hassle understanding this, but it was fun ;). Not always obvious where some configuration should be placed etc.
  • Yaml file format definitely not enough for the type of pipelines we do professionally though :(.
  • Pleasantly surprised you can actually add and remove build slaves to the drone.io platform.
  • Also pleasantly surprised by how to do parallel build steps. Syntax is super simple.
  • I really lack some form of artifact storage, or at least a plugin for something that is not either cloud based or incredibly enterprisey (artifactory). Actually, I’ve had issues just finding a good light weight open source artifact storage so far…
  • I also lack some form of nice presentation of various build artifacts, code coverage or unit test results etc.

In all, pleasantly surprised by how simple this was to setup and configure. It was a fun trip and I’ll continue using it at home for now.

As a sidenote, for the stuff I have on github, I do like to use travis, it also has a nice syntax and is a nice solution.

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