Software Dashboard

I’ll be honest. I don’t need to use a CI tool. I’m not deploying mission-critical software across multiple teams spread around the world. I don’t need sub-millisecond notification when my I’ve posted a bad commit. But I do like the idea of TDD (even if I’m an uneven practitioner).

For a long time I’ve used Travis because it was free for Open Source projects (though who isn’t these days?), and I didn’t need extravagant performance guarantees, just having it run at some point. Also I was pretty sure they weren’t going to implode anytime soon.

I liked being able to CI on both OSX and Ubuntu, but I kept running into problems with their old-and-getting-older Ubuntu distributions (and I do wonder if the OSX CI testing was just a distraction). Going down the rabbit hole of compiling FFMpeg or OpenCV 3.0 for Precise or Trusty – then navigating Launchpad to make it available – just stopped being fun.

Without a ton of investigation, I’ve started using Wercker. I like their basic concept of workflows and etc., but perhaps the biggest draw is that it’s all Docker based. On Wercker a CI workflow is: pull a docker image, run some commands in it. This kills about nineteen birds with one stone. First, building custom Docker images which contain all the dependencies for building and testing is a lot easier than making new .dpkgs, even though it’s more restrictive (it doesn’t help folks who want to run my software native on an Ubuntu box), it feels like a more sustainable path forward. Also having things Docker-ized just seems like a good idea.

Whew. All that said, I’m pretty happy with Wercker so far. It has a few wierdnesses, and I wish there was a tier between free and fully private pipeline (at $350/month), cause hey, I’d kick in a few bucks. One thing that bothers me, though, is that Travis has a great at-a-glance dashboard:

and Wercker doesn’t really.

I mean, the Feed will tell me when runs do or don’t work, but if a project fails, I ignore it, then go off and do something else for a while, that red X will eventually fall off the bottom of the page. I’d like to know which branches of which projects are broken right now with right and green lights. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

Whew, this got to be longer than I thought. Anyway, I though I’d use this opportunity to (finally) write a software dashboard which is partly a catalog of projects and links, and partly a one-stop shop of software CI status badges. Check it out…