zlacker

Having dealt with a fair bit of CI on a decent number of services (AppVeyor, Travis, CircleCI and GitHub Actions), I’ve come to the exact same conclusion.

CI is a script, and the YAML configs for those various services configure the machine type, OS and toolchain. Everything else is contained within the script. Sometimes even toolchain setup is handled by the script.

Not following this model has wasted so much time when migrating services or trying to tweak what CI does.

With a script you can run it locally to ensure it performs the steps desired, leaving the CI “setup” to minimal environment/toolchain debugging.