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Comment by avtar | Hacker News Reader

For anyone else that got excited about having a Jenkins alternative, this project seems to be only about containers and not other workloads that VMs could tackle, such as running browser or desktop-based software tests. At least that's my understanding after giving the documentation a cursory glance. Could someone familiar with the project please confirm (or hopefully correct) this?

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Some of my colleagues at Pivotal are running iOS builds with it. That is, they're running builds on a Mac which has an iOS device plugged into it. The workers are run using Houdini, which is a container management daemon that, er doesn't use containers:

https://github.com/vito/houdini

There's a blog post by someone else at Pivotal, although the details are probably a bit out of date by now:

https://blog.pivotal.io/labs/tech-talks/on-device-open-sourc...

As the author of that blog post I can confirm some of that is out of date. Hopefully I can find some time to update the post for 1.0, but the main concepts still work.

At Pivotal Toronto we're running iOS and Android builds using a mac mini as an external worker. What's been a great built in feature is using the pool resource to "check-out" a device and lock it from other tests while a suite is running.

Updates would be awesome but that blog post covered a lot, thanks! I'll spend some time looking into Concourse now.

Also, if you have some free time I would love to chat about your experience so far -- I work about 15 minutes away from Pivotal's Toronto office. My email address is listed in my profile.

We run browser-based tests in our own pipeline (I'm on the Concourse team). We just use `xvfb-run` around our test script. We also build VirtualBox images using a systemd-based Garden backend running on a dedicated server (not a VM).

I find these approaches better than risking test pollution, especially when it comes to building VMs and spinning up desktop apps.

Not using ConcourseCI, but I use containers for our browser testing. Blogged about it here - http://stacktoheap.com/blog/2016/01/04/running-webdriverio-t...

I am running a browser-based test in Concourse as we speak :)

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