On 09/04/2026 23:55, Andres Freund wrote:
As the subject says, cirrus-ci, which cfbot uses to run CI and that one can
(for now) enable on one's own repository, is shutting down.
https://cirruslabs.org/ burries the lede a bit, but it has further down:
"Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026."
I can't say I'm terribly surprised, they had been moving a lot slower in the
last few years.
Darn, I liked Cirrus CI. One reason being precisely that it has been
stable, i.e. moved slowly, for years :-).
I think having cfbot and CI that one could run on ones own repository, without
sending a mail to the community, has improved the development process a lot.
So clearly we're going to have to do something. I certainly could not have
done stuff like AIO without it.
+1. I rely heavily on cirrus CI nowadays to validate before I push.
I'd be interested in feedback about how high folks value different aspects:
1) CI software can be self hosted
E.g. to prevent at least the cfbot case from being unpredictably abandoned
again.
2) CI software is open source
E.g. out of a principled stance, or control concerns.
These probably go together.
I think it's important that you can self-host. Even with cirrus-ci I
actually wished there was an easy way to run the jobs locally. I don't
know how often I'd really do it, but especially developing and testing
the ci yaml files is painful when you can't run it locally.
3) CI runs quickly
This matters e.g. for accepting running in containers and whether it's
crucial to be able to have our images with everything pre-installed.
Pretty important. "quickly" is pretty subjective though, I'm not sure
what number to put to it. Cirrus-CI has felt fast enough.
4) CI tests as many operating systems as possible
A lot of system just support linux, plenty support macos, some support
windows. Barely any support anything beyond that.
Windows support is pretty important as it's different enough from
others. Macos is definitely good to have too. For others, we have the
buildfarm.
5) CI can be enabled on one's own repositories
Cfbot obviously allows everyone to test patches some way, but sending patch
sets to the list just to get a CI run obviously gets noisy quite fast.
There are plenty of open source CI solutions, but clearly it's not viable
for everyone to set that up for themselves. Plenty providers do allow doing
so, but the overlap of this, open source (2), multiple platforms (4) is
small if it exists.
This is important. I run the CI as part of development on my own
branches all the time.
If it's easy to self-host, that might cover it.
6) There need to be free credits for running at least some CI on one's own
repository
This makes the overlapping constraints mentioned in 5) even smaller.
There are several platforms that do provide a decent amount of CI for a
monthly charge of < 10 USD.
Not important. For running on one's own repository, it's totally
reasonable that you pay for it yourself. Especially if you can self-host
for free.
7) Provide CI compute for "well known contributors" for free in their own
repositories
An alternative to 6) - with some CI solutions - can be to add folks to some
team that allows them to use community resources (which so far have been
donated). The problem with that is that it's administratively annoying,
because one does need to be careful, or CI will be used to do
cryptocurrency mining or such within a few days.
Not important. Active contributors can easily pay for what they use, or
self-host.
- Heikki
