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Getting started with open-source Drone CI

Alex Barashkov on April 04, 2019

If you are building your side project or startup and want to avoid spending too much money on popular commercial solutions like Travic CI (which co...
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Scott Simontis

Could you please describe why you prefer Drone over some of the other free solutions like Jenkins, Team city, Azure DevOps or Gitlab CI? I've been shopping around for a CI tool and haven't considered Drone before.

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Alex Barashkov

Hi Scott,

I used Jenkins, Team City as per free solutions, used Travis CI, and read about Gitlab.

To be clear Jenkins and Team City I used last time 2 years ago, so only could compare with that state of their development.

Jenkins I did not like from the first look, very ugly, totally not a user friendly, complicated configuration, so it always required involving Devops or some guys who had more experience with this in order to make even simple things.

Team City I found much better than Jenkins, but the configuration of pipelines and configuration of Team City itself was not easy for me. Lack of yaml files, on free version they had a limits for agents and number of projects inside, if you do microservices architecture you exceed it very fast.

Gitlab the moment I tried to research it there were no easy way to use Github and Gitlab CI. I personally keep all project in Github, I like it and Github for me plays also sort of portfolio, and I don't want move my projects somewhere else.

In Drone I found everything which were necessary for me

  • no limits, you could do everything, all features available
  • very easy yaml configuration
  • very easy and smooth set up process
  • Docker based, I like the idea of that every step is totally isolated docker container and I know exactly the which image is used for which step and how does it work. It helps a lot because, there is very small chance getting some "specific" for environment errors. With Drone I actually could easy reproduce each step of pipeline on my local machine and debug it. So if one developer complains that "Oh I got error on CI, it's a problem with CI", it 99% problem in the code and the project. You just ask dev to run it in Docker on his local machine and he will get the same error and will be able to fix problem.
  • for me it seems very fast
  • nice UI and UX
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Scott Simontis

Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply! I think I will have to look into Drone. Most of my experience has been with Team City and it does feel very clunky, as much as I love Jetbrains a lot of their products can be awkward. I hear Jenkins mentioned the most but it sounds like something I don't want to learn more about now! For some reason I don't like YAML a lot and prefer code )why I like Chef more than Ansible although I don't have a lot of deep experience with them), but I'll definitely consider this.

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cnbaluramesh • Edited

Hi,

1) It's light-weight which written in go-lang.
2) Writing Yaml file very simple and straight forward linux command.
3) Deployment is faster compare to Gitlab AutoDevOps.
4) UI look's simple
5) Presently we are using for deploying the Spring-Boot application for past one year.
6) Docker image is very small.

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Henrique Oliveira

I agree. Simple and practice.

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Henrique Oliveira

Hey Alex, what's up?

I have one question, I deploy Drone in my job, I didn't want to use Jenkins and I'm loving work with Drone.

But, I need one problem, when in pipeline use any plugin, doesn't function.

Do I need any runner?

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Kyle Schwartz

Yes, you need a runner. You can find instructions for installing one here: docs.drone.io/runner/docker/instal...

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Henrique Oliveira

Thanks Kyle,

I already use, now I have to addapt my yaml file to many branchs.

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goepi

I set everything up until the point where you just jumped to "Your instance should now be up and running, simply log in and use it!". How do I "log in and use it"?

I am connected to an EC2 instance, and as far as I can tell, when I ran the big command to start the drone server it was successful. What do I do now?

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Theofanis Despoudis

What requirements are needed to run Drone?

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Alex Barashkov

It's very lightweight. You could run it even on raspberry pi. So in this example it was run on a AWS free tier which is very low performance instance but I was successfully run builds on it.

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Theofanis Despoudis

I started tinkering with it. It looks good

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Alex Barashkov

I hope you will enjoy it.

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Efrat

you left your client ID & secret out there....