DEV Community

Oscar Franco
Oscar Franco

Posted on

CI Demon, a tool to monitor your builds/deployments from your desktop

Here is a little tool I created to solve one of problems. I have worked in different companies as a software tech lead. In the projects where I worked, keeping track of the status of the software was tricky.

CI Demon

Once you have decent amount of team members and your software starts to mature, keeping track of what is broken becomes vital. You want to quickly get notified when a branch might be in a broken state or when a deployment fails.

Previously I had been using CCMenu, it adds a small icon on your macOS status bar that turns red whenever there is a broken branch. However, it came with a lot of limitations, it was a super simple tool, despite the complexity of the task it tries to solve. Therefore I came up with CI Demon, it basically takes the same idea as CCMenu (to put the status of your CI in your desktop) but expands it by offering a more complete solution.

It not only shows the status of your main project branch, but also all the branches (or even PRs), it shows additional info, like on which step the build failed. It integrates with each service API so it provides more detailed information. It can trigger a rebuild. You can also quickly share a failing branch directly from the app, and the list goes on.

People who use it, are super happy with it, it is a fairly niche tool, but I know it solves a problem; observability. Having a dedicated tool for the job will always trump integration with other tools (like slack messages, which quickly get lost).

Give it a try! I promise you won't be disappointed.

Latest comments (0)