22 ms·

The new pricing model for Travis CI

141 points by reaperhulk 6y ago

tbodt 6y ago
TL;DR: Travis CI is no longer free for open source projects. Instead you get a free trial good for 1k build minutes, and can email them to beg for more when those run out.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mushufasa 6y ago
i wonder if there are actually higher costs associated with macOS, or if this is just segmentation based on the fact that macOS users are more willing to pay more for software
- bla3 6y ago
  You can legally only run macOS on apple hardware, and that's expensive.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    Also, there's a lack of dedicated server products.
    - asciimike 6y ago
      I loved how imgix solved this: https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros (definitely not cheap, but super slick)
      - sverhagen 6y ago
        Does that actually make sense, or is it just another Engineering team doubling down on their poor early architectural choices ("or lack thereof")?
        asciimike 6y ago
        My understanding is that they needed some of the functionality in CoreGraphics, thus had to use Macs.
        mst 6y ago
        Which, if it allows them to get better quality results with less engineering time, could totally turn out to have been a sensible business decision. (no idea beyond "could", but it does at least seem plausible)
    - martin8412 6y ago
      The latest Mac Pro is sold in a rack mount version
- dinkleberg 6y ago
  Building Mac build farms is way more of a pain and absolutely costs more. There are a few services dedicated to making it easier, but Apple isn’t trying hard to make people’s lives easy in this.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    At least they're not being litigious about small shops using hackentosh VMs for CI because sticking a bunch of Mac Minis in a rack technically works but seems super silly.
- rgovostes 6y ago
  Travis CI and GitHub both use MacStadium's infrastructure for macOS builds, not their own. https://www.macstadium.com/customers/travis-ci https://www.macstadium.com/customers/travis-ci
  - brandur 6y ago
    That's fascinating – I always wondered how exactly Travis was running their Mac OS builds. Based on MacStadium's public pricing, which is $150/month for the base model of the latest Mac Mini, this cannot be cheap for Travis, especially given they offered (past tense) Mac OS builds for free. Not surprised to see them start charging more, but it's coming at exactly the wrong time given that GitHub (with Actions) is now offering a product that's a fair bit better, and it's still free.
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      MacStadium also offers some types of virtualized macOS environments, even a Kubernetes-on-Mac offering. So I'm guessing it's not all individual Mac minis running these builds... at least I hope not!
shp0ngle 6y ago
The interesting part is the FOSS changes Basically they significantly cut the FOSS usage by instead offering free credit and then reviewing the projects on case-by-case basis if you run out of it. It's a big change, but honestly, I don't know how they could they provide free computation for any public repo no questions asked as they have been up until now.
- ajdlinux 6y ago
  I see a lot of mentions of "travis-ci.com" in this post, are the OSS changes meant to impact travis-ci.org as well, or just OSS projects that are using travis-ci.com for some reason?
  - ivirshup 6y ago
    All OSS projects are supposed to move to the .com domain by the end of the year. They plan to shutdown the .org domain on December 31st. Source: https://mailchi.mp/3d439eeb1098/travis-ciorg-is-moving-to-travis-cicom https://mailchi.mp/3d439eeb1098/travis-ciorg-is-moving-to-tr...
    - ajdlinux 6y ago
      Thanks - I haven't used Travis for much in a while, so I didn't see this!
- captn3m0 6y ago
  I'm okay with the change as long as they remember to send me a notification if/when I run out of credits.
jrockway 6y ago
I guess this is the same pricing model as CircleCI? I've always found "build minutes" to be a little bit of a vendor-favored pricing model. I really love wanting to do a release, and watching my CI provider take three minutes to pull down a 30MB docker image, or "npm install" running at dialup speeds. All while they're billing you per minute -- they make money by not investing in their infrastructure! I'd prefer to pay per byte transferred and CPU instruction executed -- if they make the hardware or network faster, the price stays the same, but they can do more work with their infrastructure. And if you schedule less work, the price for you goes down. But, it's simply not done, and that's kind of sad because slow CI is probably the biggest engineering time killer in existence. Other than Hacker News ;)
- danielheath 6y ago
  This is why I strongly prefer BYO-agents systems (github actions, buildkite, jenkins). I got our CI pipeline from 90 minutes to 10 minutes by running parts in parallel and applying lots more hardware. The cost is essentially nothing ($0.10 / build) compared to the time developers spend waiting. I currently use & recommend buildkite because they offer a preconfigured cloudflare template that does all of the hard parts for you.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    It's funny, this is almost exactly the argument we used to switch to non-BYO systems – moving from Jenkins to CircleCI. We had Jenkins, but it required so much engineering time to manage, secure, upgrade, etc. Then when we hit scaling limits as our team grew, scaling it out to multiple machines took more time and cost a significant amount as we had to have capacity for peak time, which when all engineers are in one timezone is a significant peak compared to, say, the weekend. We moved to CircleCI and while I have many frustrations with it, parallelism and ability to speed up the pipeline with minimal development overhead are not really frustrations I have. The cost is also minimal compared to the developer time, and while we're getting "less for our money", because we only pay for the active time, it's actually cheaper for us than Jenkins was just for hardware rental, let alone developer time managing Jenkins. I can completely see how a different org with different constraints, different deployments, clouds, strategies, provisioning, distribution of engineers, etc, could come to the conclusion that you did – that BYO is better, but I think it does depend on so much.
benatkin 6y ago
It seems GitLab CI/CD is beating Travis CI on pretty much every metric now, except the weirdness of only using GitLab for CI/CD and not code hosting, if you prefer to use GitHub for that. Am I missing something? (GitLab supports using its CI/CD on a non-GitLab repo just fine, but it can cause some initial confusion.)
- nakedgremlin 6y ago
  Interesting. I didn't realize you can use GitLab CI/CD on non-GitLab repo. Do you happen to have a documentation on this (my searches came up empty)?
  - benatkin 6y ago
    Right here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/github_integration.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/githu...
- PaywallBuster 6y ago
  External Gitlab CI is funny because requires you to replicate the repo to their side and then glue everything together (build status, PRs, etc) by yourself Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user). For a simple 10 person team, that's 200$ a month. Exclusively to get access to repository replication !! I have my own runners, so there's no reason to pay for the paid plan. I just end up hacking around some replication script. See https://medium.com/@PedroGomes/mirror-repository-to-gitlab-for-external-ci-usage-a284d90d6f69 https://medium.com/@PedroGomes/mirror-repository-to-gitlab-f...
  - jlgaddis 6y ago
    > Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user). It looks like "pull" replication is available on the $4/mo. plan, per their documentation.
- xvilka 6y ago
  Travis CI has unique feature - support for ARMv8, PowerPC, and SystemZ build environments. GitHub doesn't have this multiplatform building environment.
abrkn 6y ago
I moved to GitHub Actions earlier this year and never looked back.
ivirshup 6y ago
Can anyone comment on how these changes are going to impact projects like conda-forge, which use the free compute time to build binaries? My reading is these projects are what's being targeted. Perhaps there are more egregious uses of their servers?
- takluyver 6y ago
  It looks like conda-forge currently uses Travis only for ppc64le builds. I'm not sure if any other free CI services offer PowerPC support - if not, it's likely to impact PowerPC support (also in many other open source projects). However, an IBM blog post in July said they were providing the servers through Travis free for open source projects on GitHub, so possibly they will agree some way to continue to offer it.
purpleidea 6y ago
I use the free travis to build https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ It's 100% open source and there's almost no income (some github sponsors) for it. I guess welp we'll have to switch away, or have to constantly send "ask" tickets to get free credits :/ Many of us will be in this position.
clashmeifyoucan 6y ago
I'm wondering if there's still a solid reason to use Travis for new projects. I can't be bothered to move my current builds from there to GitHub Actions, but for future projects GitHub Actions seems way more lucrative to use. I think both pale out in comparison to GitLab CI however, it's a pity GitLab is less popular.
- softinio 6y ago
  I like Gitlab and I tried them for a year before moving off of their CI couple of years back. Main reason was their CI was slow and had some reliability problems at the time. Hopefully they have resolved those by now as I would like to see more adoption of their service for sure. Will give them another shot soon :-)
  - clashmeifyoucan 6y ago
    I recently found a comparison¹ which was interesting. Of course, it's gitlab's so take that as you will. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/#comparison https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/#comp...
    - sytse 6y ago
      Deeplink to the GitHub Actions vs. GitLab CI part of the decision kit https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-missing-github-capabilities/ https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-mi...
- Master_Odin 6y ago
  Not really, and hasn't been for a while, assuming your hosting your code on GitHub or GitLab. Both offer a service that is comparable to Travis, and are much better backed at this point after the acquisition of Travis and gutting of their staff. The only thing I sometimes miss from Travis was the ability to run "debug" builds, but most of the time this was necessarily only because of how omnibus their VMs were and oddities of pathing.
softinio 6y ago
Think the wiser options for OSS are Github Actions & Gitlab CI going forward. I have heard good things about Azure pipelines too. After travis-ci got bought and layed off a lot of key staff I did think the day would come where they will no longer will be the defacto choice for open source and I think this news confirms that day being today :-)
- marco_craveiro 6y ago
  I've been postponing moving to Github actions, but I guess now I have no option!
- darekkay 6y ago
  I've been using GitLab CI and Travis CI interchangeably. But the recent cut to 400 pipeline minutes on GitLab CI might make it less attractive than Travis CI, even after the current change. EDIT: Travis seems to take 10 credits per minute, with 1000 free credits per month. So it seems to be the least generous tool with 100 minutes per month vs 400 (GitLab CI) and 2000 (GitHub Actions).
  - aaron42net 6y ago
    Where did you see the "per month" for Travis? The 10,000 free credits are a one-time trial from what I can see.
    - darekkay 6y ago
      This is from a Travis CI mail I got today: > You have 1,000 credits left - these will begin counting down automatically as soon as you run your first build. > You can use your credits to build on both private and open-source repositories using Linux, macOS, and Windows OS. > 1,000 credits will be replenished automatically monthly. Additional Credits purchase is not available for Free Plan.
      - takluyver 6y ago
        One of my colleagues got that email. It seems to be saying something quite different to the blog post and the billing documentation, and I don't understand how they fit together. Even if the email is accurate, which is the better scenario, though, 1000 credits is 100 minutes of Linux build time (or 50 on Windows, 20 on Mac). Which is not much for any but the smallest projects.
saagarjha 6y ago
Wow, OK, this is a pretty big change for most open source projects using Travis CI right now. I think most Mac and iOS apps are going to be hit by this, I think most major projects are using Travis at the moment. Personally, I really like that Travis offers a variety of architectures; I’m currently running binutils on it: https://travis-ci.com/github/saagarjha/binutils-gdb https://travis-ci.com/github/saagarjha/binutils-gdb. I suspect this might be a substantial portion of the CI it sees, and it’s been great that it’s been free so far. I am unsure if it will still stay up with these changes. But, I’m sure running these kinds of builds can’t be cheap at all.
alexellisuk 6y ago
For OpenFaaS (and other projects - k3sup, arkade, inlets etc) paying for Travis isn't going to be an option, as they are open source and unfunded. The Travis platform means being able to have relatively portable CI that almost never needs to change because of the CI platform. Bring a Makefile and use it locally and in the build pipeline. Moving off Travis to something like GitHub Actions will cost a significant amount of time and the opportunity cost is ridiculous. This along with the Docker Hub limits makes a very strong case for GitHub's strategy.
- nickjj 6y ago
  > The Travis platform means being able to have relatively portable CI that almost never needs to change because of the CI platform. Bring a Makefile and use it locally and in the build pipeline. What if you defined your GitHub actions to call out to shell commands? Then there's very little that's specific to GH actions. Actions are nice but personally I'd rather have my CI as generic as possible, especially for the reason you mentioned which is to be able to run things locally if needed.
konschubert 6y ago
Travis is changing from growth mode to milk-the-melting-ice-cube mode. That’s why they are turning off free foss builds.
- phaedryx 6y ago
  That's been my suspicion ever since they fired everyone remotely clueful who worked there.
tikej 6y ago
Finally! This change gives me necessary motivation to switch to fully open source alternatives (probably Drone).
- ivanche 6y ago
  Thank you, I didn't even know about Drone CI until I've read your comment! They look interesting, will definitely check them out.
arximboldi 6y ago
Travis "free drugs" mode worked for a while. I got used to it via my open-source projects and ended up having a couple of clients pay for it for some of my commercial work. Since their acquisition they have just been going downhill. I've been planning to move all my projects to Github Actions for a while. This is the "drop that overlfows the glass" as we say in Spanish, I'm putting everything aside tomorrow to migrate all my public and private projects to Github Actions.
rurban 6y ago
Looks like I finally have to bug GitHub to upgrade my GH Actions from beta to the current schema.
fucktravisci 6y ago
Looks like they also reduced the speed of the builds, so their 1000 minutes are getting wasted even faster. On my repositories, setting up NPM now takes around 120 seconds instead of 20 seconds a month ago, time of npm run build has been increased from 7 seconds to 20 seconds... The same build that took 2 minutes last month takes 4-5 minutes today
rurban 6y ago
If Apple doesn't step up now to fill the gap I have to stop supporting the osx/darwin platform for all my projects. All my 5 personal Apple laptops stopped working some time ago already. Now Apple looks like a legacy platform similar to Intel.

141 points by reaperhulk 6y ago

TL;DR: Travis CI is no longer free for open source projects. Instead you get a free trial good for 1k build minutes, and can email them to beg for more when those run out.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mushufasa 6y ago

i wonder if there are actually higher costs associated with macOS, or if this is just segmentation based on the fact that macOS users are more willing to pay more for software

bla3 6y ago
You can legally only run macOS on apple hardware, and that's expensive.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  Also, there's a lack of dedicated server products.
  - asciimike 6y ago
    I loved how imgix solved this: https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros (definitely not cheap, but super slick)
    - sverhagen 6y ago
      Does that actually make sense, or is it just another Engineering team doubling down on their poor early architectural choices ("or lack thereof")?
      - asciimike 6y ago
        My understanding is that they needed some of the functionality in CoreGraphics, thus had to use Macs.
        mst 6y ago
        Which, if it allows them to get better quality results with less engineering time, could totally turn out to have been a sensible business decision. (no idea beyond "could", but it does at least seem plausible)
  - martin8412 6y ago
    The latest Mac Pro is sold in a rack mount version
dinkleberg 6y ago
Building Mac build farms is way more of a pain and absolutely costs more. There are a few services dedicated to making it easier, but Apple isn’t trying hard to make people’s lives easy in this.
- Spivak 6y ago
  At least they're not being litigious about small shops using hackentosh VMs for CI because sticking a bunch of Mac Minis in a rack technically works but seems super silly.
rgovostes 6y ago
Travis CI and GitHub both use MacStadium's infrastructure for macOS builds, not their own. https://www.macstadium.com/customers/travis-ci https://www.macstadium.com/customers/travis-ci
- brandur 6y ago
  That's fascinating – I always wondered how exactly Travis was running their Mac OS builds. Based on MacStadium's public pricing, which is $150/month for the base model of the latest Mac Mini, this cannot be cheap for Travis, especially given they offered (past tense) Mac OS builds for free. Not surprised to see them start charging more, but it's coming at exactly the wrong time given that GitHub (with Actions) is now offering a product that's a fair bit better, and it's still free.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    MacStadium also offers some types of virtualized macOS environments, even a Kubernetes-on-Mac offering. So I'm guessing it's not all individual Mac minis running these builds... at least I hope not!

shp0ngle 6y ago

The interesting part is the FOSS changes Basically they significantly cut the FOSS usage by instead offering free credit and then reviewing the projects on case-by-case basis if you run out of it. It's a big change, but honestly, I don't know how they could they provide free computation for any public repo no questions asked as they have been up until now.

ajdlinux 6y ago
I see a lot of mentions of "travis-ci.com" in this post, are the OSS changes meant to impact travis-ci.org as well, or just OSS projects that are using travis-ci.com for some reason?
- ivirshup 6y ago
  All OSS projects are supposed to move to the .com domain by the end of the year. They plan to shutdown the .org domain on December 31st. Source: https://mailchi.mp/3d439eeb1098/travis-ciorg-is-moving-to-travis-cicom https://mailchi.mp/3d439eeb1098/travis-ciorg-is-moving-to-tr...
  - ajdlinux 6y ago
    Thanks - I haven't used Travis for much in a while, so I didn't see this!
captn3m0 6y ago
I'm okay with the change as long as they remember to send me a notification if/when I run out of credits.

jrockway 6y ago

I guess this is the same pricing model as CircleCI? I've always found "build minutes" to be a little bit of a vendor-favored pricing model. I really love wanting to do a release, and watching my CI provider take three minutes to pull down a 30MB docker image, or "npm install" running at dialup speeds. All while they're billing you per minute -- they make money by not investing in their infrastructure! I'd prefer to pay per byte transferred and CPU instruction executed -- if they make the hardware or network faster, the price stays the same, but they can do more work with their infrastructure. And if you schedule less work, the price for you goes down. But, it's simply not done, and that's kind of sad because slow CI is probably the biggest engineering time killer in existence. Other than Hacker News ;)

danielheath 6y ago
This is why I strongly prefer BYO-agents systems (github actions, buildkite, jenkins). I got our CI pipeline from 90 minutes to 10 minutes by running parts in parallel and applying lots more hardware. The cost is essentially nothing ($0.10 / build) compared to the time developers spend waiting. I currently use & recommend buildkite because they offer a preconfigured cloudflare template that does all of the hard parts for you.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  It's funny, this is almost exactly the argument we used to switch to non-BYO systems – moving from Jenkins to CircleCI. We had Jenkins, but it required so much engineering time to manage, secure, upgrade, etc. Then when we hit scaling limits as our team grew, scaling it out to multiple machines took more time and cost a significant amount as we had to have capacity for peak time, which when all engineers are in one timezone is a significant peak compared to, say, the weekend. We moved to CircleCI and while I have many frustrations with it, parallelism and ability to speed up the pipeline with minimal development overhead are not really frustrations I have. The cost is also minimal compared to the developer time, and while we're getting "less for our money", because we only pay for the active time, it's actually cheaper for us than Jenkins was just for hardware rental, let alone developer time managing Jenkins. I can completely see how a different org with different constraints, different deployments, clouds, strategies, provisioning, distribution of engineers, etc, could come to the conclusion that you did – that BYO is better, but I think it does depend on so much.

benatkin 6y ago

It seems GitLab CI/CD is beating Travis CI on pretty much every metric now, except the weirdness of only using GitLab for CI/CD and not code hosting, if you prefer to use GitHub for that. Am I missing something? (GitLab supports using its CI/CD on a non-GitLab repo just fine, but it can cause some initial confusion.)

nakedgremlin 6y ago
Interesting. I didn't realize you can use GitLab CI/CD on non-GitLab repo. Do you happen to have a documentation on this (my searches came up empty)?
- benatkin 6y ago
  Right here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/github_integration.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/githu...
PaywallBuster 6y ago
External Gitlab CI is funny because requires you to replicate the repo to their side and then glue everything together (build status, PRs, etc) by yourself Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user). For a simple 10 person team, that's 200$ a month. Exclusively to get access to repository replication !! I have my own runners, so there's no reason to pay for the paid plan. I just end up hacking around some replication script. See https://medium.com/@PedroGomes/mirror-repository-to-gitlab-for-external-ci-usage-a284d90d6f69 https://medium.com/@PedroGomes/mirror-repository-to-gitlab-f...
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  > Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user). It looks like "pull" replication is available on the $4/mo. plan, per their documentation.
xvilka 6y ago
Travis CI has unique feature - support for ARMv8, PowerPC, and SystemZ build environments. GitHub doesn't have this multiplatform building environment.

abrkn 6y ago

I moved to GitHub Actions earlier this year and never looked back.

ivirshup 6y ago

Can anyone comment on how these changes are going to impact projects like conda-forge, which use the free compute time to build binaries? My reading is these projects are what's being targeted. Perhaps there are more egregious uses of their servers?

takluyver 6y ago
It looks like conda-forge currently uses Travis only for ppc64le builds. I'm not sure if any other free CI services offer PowerPC support - if not, it's likely to impact PowerPC support (also in many other open source projects). However, an IBM blog post in July said they were providing the servers through Travis free for open source projects on GitHub, so possibly they will agree some way to continue to offer it.

purpleidea 6y ago

I use the free travis to build https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ It's 100% open source and there's almost no income (some github sponsors) for it. I guess welp we'll have to switch away, or have to constantly send "ask" tickets to get free credits :/ Many of us will be in this position.

clashmeifyoucan 6y ago

I'm wondering if there's still a solid reason to use Travis for new projects. I can't be bothered to move my current builds from there to GitHub Actions, but for future projects GitHub Actions seems way more lucrative to use. I think both pale out in comparison to GitLab CI however, it's a pity GitLab is less popular.

softinio 6y ago
I like Gitlab and I tried them for a year before moving off of their CI couple of years back. Main reason was their CI was slow and had some reliability problems at the time. Hopefully they have resolved those by now as I would like to see more adoption of their service for sure. Will give them another shot soon :-)
- clashmeifyoucan 6y ago
  I recently found a comparison¹ which was interesting. Of course, it's gitlab's so take that as you will. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/#comparison https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/#comp...
  - sytse 6y ago
    Deeplink to the GitHub Actions vs. GitLab CI part of the decision kit https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-missing-github-capabilities/ https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-mi...
Master_Odin 6y ago
Not really, and hasn't been for a while, assuming your hosting your code on GitHub or GitLab. Both offer a service that is comparable to Travis, and are much better backed at this point after the acquisition of Travis and gutting of their staff. The only thing I sometimes miss from Travis was the ability to run "debug" builds, but most of the time this was necessarily only because of how omnibus their VMs were and oddities of pathing.

softinio 6y ago

Think the wiser options for OSS are Github Actions & Gitlab CI going forward. I have heard good things about Azure pipelines too. After travis-ci got bought and layed off a lot of key staff I did think the day would come where they will no longer will be the defacto choice for open source and I think this news confirms that day being today :-)

marco_craveiro 6y ago
I've been postponing moving to Github actions, but I guess now I have no option!
darekkay 6y ago
I've been using GitLab CI and Travis CI interchangeably. But the recent cut to 400 pipeline minutes on GitLab CI might make it less attractive than Travis CI, even after the current change. EDIT: Travis seems to take 10 credits per minute, with 1000 free credits per month. So it seems to be the least generous tool with 100 minutes per month vs 400 (GitLab CI) and 2000 (GitHub Actions).
- aaron42net 6y ago
  Where did you see the "per month" for Travis? The 10,000 free credits are a one-time trial from what I can see.
  - darekkay 6y ago
    This is from a Travis CI mail I got today: > You have 1,000 credits left - these will begin counting down automatically as soon as you run your first build. > You can use your credits to build on both private and open-source repositories using Linux, macOS, and Windows OS. > 1,000 credits will be replenished automatically monthly. Additional Credits purchase is not available for Free Plan.
    - takluyver 6y ago
      One of my colleagues got that email. It seems to be saying something quite different to the blog post and the billing documentation, and I don't understand how they fit together. Even if the email is accurate, which is the better scenario, though, 1000 credits is 100 minutes of Linux build time (or 50 on Windows, 20 on Mac). Which is not much for any but the smallest projects.

saagarjha 6y ago

Wow, OK, this is a pretty big change for most open source projects using Travis CI right now. I think most Mac and iOS apps are going to be hit by this, I think most major projects are using Travis at the moment. Personally, I really like that Travis offers a variety of architectures; I’m currently running binutils on it: https://travis-ci.com/github/saagarjha/binutils-gdb https://travis-ci.com/github/saagarjha/binutils-gdb. I suspect this might be a substantial portion of the CI it sees, and it’s been great that it’s been free so far. I am unsure if it will still stay up with these changes. But, I’m sure running these kinds of builds can’t be cheap at all.

alexellisuk 6y ago

For OpenFaaS (and other projects - k3sup, arkade, inlets etc) paying for Travis isn't going to be an option, as they are open source and unfunded. The Travis platform means being able to have relatively portable CI that almost never needs to change because of the CI platform. Bring a Makefile and use it locally and in the build pipeline. Moving off Travis to something like GitHub Actions will cost a significant amount of time and the opportunity cost is ridiculous. This along with the Docker Hub limits makes a very strong case for GitHub's strategy.

nickjj 6y ago
> The Travis platform means being able to have relatively portable CI that almost never needs to change because of the CI platform. Bring a Makefile and use it locally and in the build pipeline. What if you defined your GitHub actions to call out to shell commands? Then there's very little that's specific to GH actions. Actions are nice but personally I'd rather have my CI as generic as possible, especially for the reason you mentioned which is to be able to run things locally if needed.

konschubert 6y ago

Travis is changing from growth mode to milk-the-melting-ice-cube mode. That’s why they are turning off free foss builds.

phaedryx 6y ago
That's been my suspicion ever since they fired everyone remotely clueful who worked there.

tikej 6y ago

Finally! This change gives me necessary motivation to switch to fully open source alternatives (probably Drone).

ivanche 6y ago
Thank you, I didn't even know about Drone CI until I've read your comment! They look interesting, will definitely check them out.

arximboldi 6y ago

Travis "free drugs" mode worked for a while. I got used to it via my open-source projects and ended up having a couple of clients pay for it for some of my commercial work. Since their acquisition they have just been going downhill. I've been planning to move all my projects to Github Actions for a while. This is the "drop that overlfows the glass" as we say in Spanish, I'm putting everything aside tomorrow to migrate all my public and private projects to Github Actions.

rurban 6y ago

Looks like I finally have to bug GitHub to upgrade my GH Actions from beta to the current schema.

fucktravisci 6y ago

Looks like they also reduced the speed of the builds, so their 1000 minutes are getting wasted even faster. On my repositories, setting up NPM now takes around 120 seconds instead of 20 seconds a month ago, time of npm run build has been increased from 7 seconds to 20 seconds... The same build that took 2 minutes last month takes 4-5 minutes today

rurban 6y ago

If Apple doesn't step up now to fill the gap I have to stop supporting the osx/darwin platform for all my projects. All my 5 personal Apple laptops stopped working some time ago already. Now Apple looks like a legacy platform similar to Intel.