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Comment on Setting Up a Jenkins Home Lab

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If one were to have a choice, I would steer clear of jenkins for home use, and use a gitlab runner instead

Jenkins is fine, if you commit to maintaining it, but thats a non trivial task.

THe joy and pain of the gitlab runner is that the job is tied directly to the git repo its attached to. This means that unlike jenkins, the setup is versioned, meaning disaster recovery is much more simple (spin up new runner, attach to project. Done.)

You do then sacrifice multi-project pipelines, but even in very large companies, I've only missed that feature once. It also in no way makes up for having to look after 60+ jenkins masters. (dont ask)

Yes, you gitlab gives you less control over environment, but I would put forward that this is only an advantage when running on windows.

In GitLab we have shared group/instance runners now as well as multiproject pipelines.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/multi_project_pipelines.html

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/runners/#shared-specific-and-g...

We are focusing on improving the new user experience here, so OP if you decide to try out GitLab I'd love to hear what works well and what doesn't.

At $work we properly rinse autoscale shared project runners. (we make lots of CUDA lumps so we need GPUs to test, and they are uber expensive.)

I wasn't aware of multi-pipeline, so if I bump into that problem again, I'll give it a go

Second this... As someone who's a very small start-up the GitLab CI/CD pipelines are SO much more simple/manageable vs. anything I've ever done with Jenkins.

I self-host GitLab on Linode with a single runner in the cloud (and sometimes use runners on my local machines to speed processes up).

With 15-ish hours of configuration I have my GitLab hosting my SCM, my CI/CD, all of my static HTML sites, my artifact storage, my Docker registry, and even my documentation (I've almost switched 100% over to using their Web IDE to edit markdown).

I've been running this way for over a year and it's incredibly easy to keep maintained. GitLab's upgrade cycles are some of the smoothest around and are always packed with useful features. Overall I've been self-hosting GitLab for about 7 years - it's one of the best software products I've ever used.

Although I love to shill for them - I have no affiliation with GitLab outside of being an enthusiastic user.

Similar situation for me. But I kept using gitlab.com (I didn't want to maintain anything more than I have to)

At $work-1 I had been managing ~800 github repos with circleCI integrations. I was reluctant to stay on gitlab, especially with the hilarious down times in 2018. Two things kept me on there:

1) the runners

2) the ease of organising repos into projects

Now that the SRE team are up to scratch, I don't think I'd go back to github.

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