Updating Our macOS Open Source Offering

https://blog.travis-ci.com/2017-09-22-macos-update

by ingve • 9 years ago

42 18 9 years ago

boris2• 9 years ago

Shameless plug for open source C/C++ projects: if you add support for the build2[1] build system, we will CI[2] your project on Mac OS (as well as Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD with various versions of GCC, Clang, and VC) for free and without any limits.

For those curious about the setup, we have our own infrastructure that runs a custom in-memory Linux-based OS called Build OS[3] that performs build tasks in throw-away VMs (KVM). This is used for all targets, including Mac OS (though we have to run Mac OS builds on a bunch of Mac Mini's due to Apple's licensing restrictions).

[1] https://build2.org

[2] https://cppget.org/?builds

[3] https://git.build2.org/cgit/buildos/tree/

ksherlock• 9 years ago

I build travis CI jobs on Mac OS because that's the easiest way to get a reasonably modern c++ compiler. I'm glad somebody realizes there's life beyond c++-03

ameliaquining• 9 years ago

Why can't you just run Clang on Linux? Surely its C++11 and later features aren't exclusive to macOS? Or are you talking about some other compiler?

winter_blue• 9 years ago

Is there any service like Travis CI or CircleDI that lets you add your own slaves? Jenkins let's you turn a box into a slave by running a simple jar file.

It would be nice if CircleCI or Travis CI offered as that would mean not having to pay them for instances and instead turning AWS instances into CircleCI/Travis slaves at a lower per-instance cost. I'd still be happy to pay for their website and for their system managing the slaves.

xahrepap• 9 years ago

GitLab CI does this.

favorited• 9 years ago

It has always been avoided in Jenkins-based systems for security purposes. Traditionally, slaves could request that masters do pretty much anything, as Jenkins treated the master/slave relationship as one large system rather than isolated and restricted nodes.

This has gotten slightly better over time, but the default is still "slave is just another process alongside the master" – you need to setup any whitelisting of slave filesystem or execution permissions yourself.

tekacs• 9 years ago

Hosted service: https://buildkite.com

Self hosted: Gitlab

Snappy• 9 years ago

To be clear, you can do this with hosted GitLab.com as well.

nas• 9 years ago

I think the TLDR summary is that MacOS doesn't work very well in the datacenter. The hardware is not designed for rack mounting. The OS licensing is not friendly to running VMs. I wonder if this is going to bite Apple in the long run. Building datacenters that run Linux is so much easier and cheaper. Microsoft has been trying to up their game but Apple apparently has no interest or no clue. Maybe that's fine. They are awash in money from their iPhone hardware so why should they care.

Edit: photo of goofy setup here https://www.macstadium.com/datacenters/

GMBook• 9 years ago

I'm not sure goofy is the word. Looks pretty neat to me. (recent tweet by their VP with a picture:https://twitter.com/brianstucki/status/897076500049969152)

But you're right, it needs to scale much better. I'm surprised how many people think macOS VMs are available at Amazon only to visit and see that's not the case. Maybe this is part of the reason for all the new Apple data centers...someday.

eridius2• 9 years ago

The OS licensing is friendly to running VMs as long as the underlying hardware is Mac hardware.

Building datacenters that run Linux is easier and cheaper, but Apple is a hardware company, they want to sell you hardware, so there's not much incentive for them to allow people to virtualize macOS on non-Mac hardware.

boris2• 9 years ago

I wouldn't call a limit to two VMs friendly. Plus Apple doesn't make suitable hardware for this.

cwyers2• 9 years ago

Apple can't be unaware that this is a problem, right? They have to be one of the biggest users of such a solution for building and testing software on Macs and iOS devices. What do they do? And why aren't they (either themselves or in partnership with someone like IBM) offering a SaaS product for Mac/iOS developers to handle this sort of thing?

jdboyd• 9 years ago

It is possible to run macOS on beefier hardware (if you ignore the license) and run more VMs per host (again, if you ignore the license). In Apple's case, they don't have license issues to worry about and thus can do their SaaS/CI stuff in VMs on as many of the beefiest servers that make sense to buy instead of having to fight with Mini's or racking Mac Pros. I expect that most likely they are currently doing that on beefy machines from a cloud hardware vendor like Quantas or Dell.

cwyers2• 9 years ago

Sure, but Apple has to know that about their license, right? So why haven't they (either directly or with a cloud vendor) provided a SaaS product like this?

rdli• 9 years ago

We use Travis for Mac & Linux builds of OSS projects (e.g., https://www.telepresence.io). What's frustrating is that even the paid service for Mac is just as bad. We're on the East Coast, so we can use Travis for Mac in the morning, but it's terrible by lunchtime.

Fun fact: before Travis had multi-stage builds, we were able to get multi-stage builds in Travis by using the fact that mac builds were ALWAYS slower than Linux. So we could have our Linux builds create artifacts that were then used by Mac builds ...

Updating Our macOS Open Source Offering

Related Stories