Show HN: Jet – Codeship’s CI Platform for Docker

I love the idea of this, and I have been spending a lot of time recently with docker compose and jet. The problem I keep coming up against is the lack of documentation for jet. It uses a similar-but-different approach to docker compose. Docker compose has tons of stuff available, but is focussed strongly on describing a complete live system rather than setting up for CI. Unfortunately, so far I have been completely unable to find any detailed documentation for jet other than a few examples which don't do quite what I need, so fussing with jet's yml files takes much longer and is very frustrating.

I know the product is quite new, and I'm willing to cut it a bit of slack. I'm also willing to contribute to a beta program or write documentation, blog posts etc. to help others if there's any way I could get access to more detailed information (source code with an NDA if that's all you have)

Can anyone help?

I've been evaluating the new Docker platform for a few months, and I definitely prefer it to anything else I've used. It fills a void that I was frustrated existed - there aren't, or at least weren't, any CI hosts that would take a repository with a docker-compose.yml file and let you run tests against the services defined therein. To be clear, Jet doesn't do this exactly, but it does let you define services with the same format as docker-compose.yml which I've found to be even more useful.

Currently we use a custom AMI (with docker and compose installed) running bamboo on bamboo's on-demand service, but we've been bitten a couple of times as Bamboo updates their protocols without notice and causes our agents to start failing. It's not an issue if you use their official AMIs, but maintaining your own is not as easy as you'd hope.

That said, I have had some problems with the support channels at CodeShip. I know I've just been a free user evaluating the service and am probably not a high priority, but my experience hasn't been positive.

After activating Docker builds for my account, I was unable to get a test build working. It turns out that this was because of an unusual bug with service names (if I named my service `web`, it would attempt to load up what looked like an internal codeship container instead of the one specified in my config), but I didn't know that at the time.

My first support request was simply ignored. After a couple more months I decided to try a build again, but the bug was still affecting me. My second support request was dismissed as a temporary problem with the docker build services ("running out of resources") which seemed unlikely given the circumstances.

Through trial and error I discovered the service naming issue and followed up on my support ticket to report it. No response to that, either.

All in all I came away thinking it was a pretty nice service with pretty lousy support.

Really excited about this. Getting docker to play nice with CI/CD tools has been a major pain for me. Ended up writing way-to-many custom scripts to handle the meat of the processes, but I was hoping there would be a better way. Now it sounds like there is!

@Evan: Thanks for the feedback, great to hear that. I'm sorry for the bad support experience you got. We're currently building out our tooling for providing a better support experience and are prioritizing paid customer over anybody else. I hope we can share some of those learnings in a blog post soon.

Codeship founder/ceo here: We would love to get your feedback! Contact details @ profile :)