Well this is a big topic, but I’ve been looking at CI products for a while now. We have some unique requirements that make it hard to pick one such as:

  1. 8GB of real memory for certain builds particularly Boost and QEMU
  2. Ability to install and run docker containers as the build system itself needs to start docker containers. So it can’t itself run be run inside docker.
  3. Sudo privileges for various packages so it can’t run unprivileged.
  4. Ease of use is really nice too as I’m not too expert.
  5. Run Ubuntu 14.04. This is less of a problem now but six months ago this was a problem as most build environments used 12.04.

Here’s what I’ve found:

  1. Not many systems tell you how much memory they allow. For instance CircleCI is limited to 4GB and it is not obvious when it fails as it will wipe a container. Also it’s virtualization does not permit swapfiles so you can’t expand this limit
  2. Codeship in it’s legacy mode does not allow sudo privileges although it does provide 10GB of real memory.
  3. Travis CI would seem to work but it is $120 per month so it would be nice to be able to have our own servers too.

So what are some others to try:

  1. Jenkins. This is supposed to be hard to use, but will run on our own servers
  2. Bamboo. Also heard some good things about this Atlasssian product
  3. Drone.io. Ok I admit it a cool name!

I’m Rich & Co.

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