When comparing Shippable vs Nevercode, the Slant community recommends Shippable for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted continuous integration services?” Shippable is ranked 4th while Nevercode is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Shippable is:
The fact that Shippable runs inside of Docker means that it keeps a persistent state and every build will not have to revert to initial state where it needs to install every dependency from the ground up. Classic CI tools that run on virtual machines need to reset their environment every time and every time install the gems, packages and services needed.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Builds are faster
The fact that Shippable runs inside of Docker means that it keeps a persistent state and every build will not have to revert to initial state where it needs to install every dependency from the ground up. Classic CI tools that run on virtual machines need to reset their environment every time and every time install the gems, packages and services needed.
Pro GitHub and Bitbucket integration
Shippable supports both BitBucket and GitHub. Repositories uploaded on either of those services can be built using Shippable.
Pro Free plan available
Unlimited builds for unlimited public repos and up to 5 private repositories.
Pro Docker integration
Shippable is built using Docker, a popular open source Linux container. It was originally built using it's own container but when that started to become too complex, they switched to using Docker. Since the beginning Shippable was different from other CI tools because while Shippable uses a container (Docker), traditionally CI tools have used virtual machines to manage their workloads.
Pro Quick setup
All Shippable needs for it's setup is a shippable.yml
file in the root of the repository that needs to be built. The bare minimum Shippable needs is the language and the version number specified in that file.
Pro Integrated code coverage and test results visualization
No need to use coveralls or any other tool for code coverage visualization. Code coverage and test results are integrated into the product.
Pro Build as Code
Builds are described in the shippable.yml file located in the root of your project. This empowers engineers to take responsibility for code delivery. If you are coming from Travis CI, Shippable reads your .travis.yml file directly so you can try it out painlessly.
Pro Build on your own host
Teams can set up Docker containers on their own servers and run Shippable in there.
Pro Supports monitoring and tracking utilization and system performance for your devops automation infrastructure
Pro Cheaper than competitors
Plans are significantly cheaper than competitors.
Pro Testing against multiple runtimes, versions and environments
Supports builds against multiple runtimes, environment variables, and platforms.
Pro 2X faster than any other platform
The accuracy & speed is 2x more compared to all the other available CI & CD platforms.
Pro Ability to run tests on real devices
Simulating or emulating tests is good - actually testing on real hardware is better as you'll catch device (manufacturer) specific issues that would kill your app ratings in the wild.
Pro Multiple integrations to cover your needs
Simplifies the instant access to the latest state of your apps.
Pro Easy to setup
There's no configuration files to write, nothing to download or install, nothing to really configure. Setting it up takes basically only adding your Git repository and waiting for the clone, build and test to finish.
Pro Focused on mobile app development
It's dedicated to mobile platforms and supports Andorid, iOS native apps + a couple of cross-platform frameworks such as Cordova and Ionic.
Cons
Con Requires way to much permissions when logging in using Bitbucket
It even requests the permission to "Delete your repositories".
Con No Direct Deploy to S3
Currently, Shippable does not allow for build artifacts to be natively deployed to S3. This can be gotten around, however it is a rather large hole when compared to Travis.
In order to deploy to S3 you have to add a couple of lines to the yml file. For example:
env:
global:
#secure variable contains values for AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
- secure: HKwYujx/qmsyQQdHvR2myu8HLUDtcLeDyYV149YJuxIV4J7Hk3SxeY8X3D6aTlR8mvMnd/ZFY+tGNUh4G0xtLLjjZcPsBgvFlB
build:
on_success:
- aws s3 sync $SHIPPABLE_BUILD_DIR "s3://bucket_name" --region "us-east-1"
Con Docker security measures may be a hindrance
Shippable runs inside Docker containers. Docker has some specific security measures which may or may not become a hindrance in using Shippable. It may be harder for users who are not very comfortable with a Linux container environment and that can create some security problems. Even for more advanced users, it's still something more that they have to address while using Shippable.