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by davnicwil 2161 days ago
For anybody interested in playing around with and hacking on different CI / devops stuff I recently launched https://boxci.dev, which is a distributed CI service where the builds run on your own hardware, via a lightweight runner that just does coordination and runs build shell commands on bare metal, so it's a bit more hackable / flexible than (for instance) GH actions / Gitlab CI.

It's free to sign up and play around with it, and I'd love to get the feedback of any HNs who think this could be useful (I basically built it because it's the CI service I want to exist, and I think others might too).

3 comments

> where the builds run on your own hardware

This is possible with GitHub Actions, too: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/... (the place I work at uses it.)

This looks awesome.

As someone who's a bit newer to CI/CD, this solution would be ideal if you don't want to host Jenkins yourself right?

I just give you access to my GitHub repos, install the agent then whenever I commit something into GitHub, the agent will see this and perform the task/pipeline right?

Similarly to how Jenkins works, except I don't need to install Jenkins - I just install the agent instead.

Exactly right!

And just to emphasise, even the agents are totally ephemeral and don't require much management effort on your side - you can install and spin them up/down on any machine at any time just through shell commands and the service automatically manages this agent pool and sends builds to it - no manual steps at all. If no agents are running, builds just sit in a queue.

If you'd be interested in playing around with it and have any questions, please feel free to email me (email's in my profile).

neat. Looks similar to https://buildkite.com .
Yep! We've been doing this at Buildkite for six years now. We're lucky to have a lot of fantastic customers who have helped us learn over the years what makes a great hybrid SaaS/self-hosted CI solution.