Alternatives to Tower logo

Alternatives to Tower

AWX, Ansible, SourceTree, GitKraken, and Git are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Tower.
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80

What is Tower and what are its top alternatives?

Tower is a popular Git desktop client that provides a user-friendly interface for managing repositories, branches, commits, and more. Key features of Tower include a visually appealing interface, integration with popular Git hosting services, support for Git Flow, and powerful search and filtering capabilities. However, Tower is only available for macOS and comes with a price tag, making it less accessible to users on a budget.

  1. GitHub Desktop: GitHub Desktop is a free Git client that offers an intuitive interface for managing repositories, viewing changes, and collaborating with team members. It is available for both Windows and macOS users. Pros include its simplicity and seamless integration with GitHub, while cons may include the lack of advanced features present in Tower.

  2. GitKraken: GitKraken is a cross-platform Git client that boasts a sleek interface and powerful features such as a visual commit history, drag-and-drop functionality, and built-in GitFlow support. Pros include its user-friendly design and integrations with popular services, while cons may include a more limited free version compared to Tower.

  3. SourceTree: SourceTree is a free Git client developed by Atlassian, offering a comprehensive set of features for managing repositories, visualizing changes, and collaborating with team members. Pros of SourceTree include its robust functionality and support for both Git and Mercurial, while cons may include occasional performance issues compared to Tower.

  4. GitAhead: GitAhead is a lightweight and fast Git client with a focus on simplicity and performance. It offers features such as an intuitive interface, advanced search capabilities, and support for multiple platforms. Pros include its speed and ease of use, while cons may include the lack of certain advanced features found in Tower.

  5. Fork: Fork is a feature-packed Git client for Windows and macOS, offering a range of tools for managing repositories, viewing changes, and collaborating with team members. Pros of Fork include its extensive feature set and customizable interface, while cons may include a steeper learning curve compared to Tower.

  6. GitUp: GitUp is a minimalist Git client for macOS that focuses on speed and simplicity. It offers a streamlined interface for managing repositories, visualizing changes, and performing Git operations efficiently. Pros include its fast performance and clean design, while cons may include the lack of advanced features present in Tower.

  7. SmartGit: SmartGit is a professional Git client that caters to advanced users with features such as commit staging, branching workflows, and conflict resolution tools. Pros of SmartGit include its comprehensive feature set and support for Git and Mercurial, while cons may include a higher learning curve compared to Tower.

  8. Magit: Magit is a powerful Git interface built for Emacs users, offering a wide range of features for managing repositories, staging changes, and interacting with Git commands. Pros of Magit include its deep integration with Emacs and extensive customization options, while cons may include a potentially steep learning curve for new users.

  9. Plastic SCM: Plastic SCM is a version control system that provides advanced features for managing code repositories, branching strategies, and workflow automation. Pros of Plastic SCM include its robust functionality and support for large-scale projects, while cons may include a more complex setup process compared to Tower.

  10. GitTower CLI: GitTower CLI is a command-line interface for Tower, allowing users to perform Git operations directly from the terminal. Pros of GitTower CLI include its seamless integration with Tower and advanced functionality for power users, while cons may include a reliance on the Tower application for full functionality.

Top Alternatives to Tower

  • AWX
    AWX

    AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is the upstream project for Tower, a commercial derivative of AWX. Ansible Towers powers enterprise automation by adding control, security and delegation capabilities to Ansible environments. ...

  • Ansible
    Ansible

    Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use. ...

  • SourceTree
    SourceTree

    Use the full capability of Git and Mercurial in the SourceTree desktop app. Manage all your repositories, hosted or local, through SourceTree's simple interface. ...

  • GitKraken
    GitKraken

    The downright luxurious Git client for Windows, Mac and Linux. Cross-platform, 100% standalone, and free. ...

  • Git
    Git

    Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. ...

  • GitHub
    GitHub

    GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together. ...

  • Visual Studio Code
    Visual Studio Code

    Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. ...

  • Docker
    Docker

    The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere ...

Tower alternatives & related posts

AWX logo

AWX

140
259
1
Centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard
140
259
+ 1
1
PROS OF AWX
  • 1
    Open source
CONS OF AWX
    Be the first to leave a con

    related AWX posts

    Shared insights
    on
    KubernetesKubernetesHarborHarborAWXAWXDockerDocker

    We are operating a smart water purification plant called AAA. AAA has a Docker-based AI platform, and we want to build several water purification plants like this. In addition, it plans to create a headquarters that manages these water purification plants in an integrated way and build a big data platform there. Although I don't know if Ansible AWX can replace Harbor or Kubernetes among the three solutions above, I would like to know which solution is suitable for us and why. May your business go well...

    See more
    Ansible logo

    Ansible

    19.1K
    15.4K
    1.3K
    Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine
    19.1K
    15.4K
    + 1
    1.3K
    PROS OF ANSIBLE
    • 284
      Agentless
    • 210
      Great configuration
    • 199
      Simple
    • 176
      Powerful
    • 155
      Easy to learn
    • 69
      Flexible
    • 55
      Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
    • 35
      Makes sense
    • 30
      Super efficient and flexible
    • 27
      Powerful
    • 11
      Dynamic Inventory
    • 9
      Backed by Red Hat
    • 7
      Works with AWS
    • 6
      Cloud Oriented
    • 6
      Easy to maintain
    • 4
      Vagrant provisioner
    • 4
      Simple and powerful
    • 4
      Multi language
    • 4
      Simple
    • 4
      Because SSH
    • 4
      Procedural or declarative, or both
    • 4
      Easy
    • 3
      Consistency
    • 2
      Well-documented
    • 2
      Masterless
    • 2
      Debugging is simple
    • 2
      Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
    • 2
      Fast as hell
    • 1
      Manage any OS
    • 1
      Work on windows, but difficult to manage
    • 1
      Certified Content
    CONS OF ANSIBLE
    • 8
      Dangerous
    • 5
      Hard to install
    • 3
      Doesn't Run on Windows
    • 3
      Bloated
    • 3
      Backward compatibility
    • 2
      No immutable infrastructure

    related Ansible posts

    Tymoteusz Paul
    Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.8M views

    Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

    It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

    I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

    We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

    If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

    The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

    Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

    See more
    Sebastian Gębski

    Heroku was a decent choice to start a business, but at some point our platform was too big, too complex & too heterogenic, so Heroku started to be a constraint, not a benefit. First, we've started containerizing our apps with Docker to eliminate "works in my machine" syndrome & uniformize the environment setup. The first orchestration was composed with Docker Compose , but at some point it made sense to move it to Kubernetes. Fortunately, we've made a very good technical decision when starting our work with containers - all the container configuration & provisions HAD (since the beginning) to be done in code (Infrastructure as Code) - we've used Terraform & Ansible for that (correspondingly). This general trend of containerisation was accompanied by another, parallel & equally big project: migrating environments from Heroku to AWS: using Amazon EC2 , Amazon EKS, Amazon S3 & Amazon RDS.

    See more
    SourceTree logo

    SourceTree

    10.5K
    8K
    727
    A free Git GUI client for Windows and macOS
    10.5K
    8K
    + 1
    727
    PROS OF SOURCETREE
    • 205
      Visual history and branch view
    • 164
      Beautiful UI
    • 134
      Easy repository browsing
    • 87
      Gitflow support
    • 75
      Interactive stage or discard by hunks or lines
    • 22
      Great branch visualization
    • 18
      Ui/ux and user-friendliness
    • 8
      Best Git Client UI/Features
    • 7
      Search commit messages
    • 5
      Available for Windows and macOS
    • 1
      Log only one file
    • 1
      Search file content
    CONS OF SOURCETREE
    • 12
      Crashes often
    • 8
      So many bugs
    • 7
      Fetching is slow sometimes
    • 5
      No dark theme (Windows)
    • 5
      Extremely slow
    • 5
      Very unstable
    • 4
      Can't select text in diff (windows)
    • 3
      Freezes quite frequently
    • 3
      Can't scale window from top corners
    • 2
      UI blinking
    • 2
      Windows version worse than mac version
    • 2
      Installs to AppData folder (windows)
    • 2
      Diff makes tab indentation look like spaces
    • 2
      Windows and Mac versions are very different
    • 2
      Diff appears as if space indented even if its tabs
    • 2
      Doesn't have an option for git init
    • 2
      Useless for merge conflict resolution
    • 2
      Doesn't differentiate submodules from parent repos
    • 2
      Requires bitbucket account
    • 1
      Generally hard to like
    • 1
      No reflog support
    • 1
      Bases binary check on filesize
    • 1
      Can't add remotes by right clicking remotes (windows)

    related SourceTree posts

    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11.2M views

    Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

    • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
    • Respectively Git as revision control system
    • SourceTree as Git GUI
    • Visual Studio Code as IDE
    • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
    • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
    • SonarQube as quality gate
    • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
    • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
    • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
    • Heroku for deploying in test environments
    • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
    • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
    • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
    • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
    • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

    The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

    • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
    • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
    • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
    • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
    • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
    • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
    See more
    Cees Timmerman

    Tower appears to be between GitKraken and SourceTree in detail, but gave two scary error dialogs when attempting to merge resulted in a conflict. Doing the same in SourceTree just worked and showed the conflict in its handy file view that's always visible (unlike Tower's mere "Merge branch 'X' into develop" message when the commit is selected).

    Both GitKraken and Tower lack the commit hash in their history overview, requiring one to select a commit to see it.

    GitKraken appears to be the only Windows 10 Git GUI suitable for night shifts, but like Tower is only free for 30 days, unlike SourceTree.

    See more
    GitKraken logo

    GitKraken

    720
    908
    279
    Git GUI Client for Windows Mac and Linux built on Electron
    720
    908
    + 1
    279
    PROS OF GITKRAKEN
    • 59
      Dark theme
    • 34
      Best linux git client
    • 29
      Great overview
    • 21
      Full featured client
    • 20
      Gitflow support
    • 19
      Beautiful UI
    • 18
      Very easy to use
    • 16
      Graph
    • 13
      Works great on both linux and windows
    • 13
      Effortless
    • 6
      Easy Merge Conflict Tool
    • 5
      Amazing Github and Bitbucket integration
    • 4
      Great UX
    • 3
      Integration with GitHub
    • 3
      Automatic Repo Discovery
    • 3
      Submodule support
    • 3
      Easy to Learn and Setup
    • 3
      Super fast
    • 2
      Fuzzy find (CTRL P)
    • 1
      Very user friendly
    • 1
      Much more stable than source tree
    • 1
      Great for non-dev users
    • 1
      Because it has Linux client
    • 1
      Command palette (CTRL Shift P)
    CONS OF GITKRAKEN
    • 3
      Extremely slow when working with large repositories
    • 3
      No edit/fixup in interactive rebase
    • 3
      Hangs occasionally (not as bad as sourcetree)
    • 2
      Not as many features as sourcetree
    • 2
      Do not allow to directly edit staging area
    • 2
      Does not work like a Mac app

    related GitKraken posts

    Cees Timmerman

    Tower appears to be between GitKraken and SourceTree in detail, but gave two scary error dialogs when attempting to merge resulted in a conflict. Doing the same in SourceTree just worked and showed the conflict in its handy file view that's always visible (unlike Tower's mere "Merge branch 'X' into develop" message when the commit is selected).

    Both GitKraken and Tower lack the commit hash in their history overview, requiring one to select a commit to see it.

    GitKraken appears to be the only Windows 10 Git GUI suitable for night shifts, but like Tower is only free for 30 days, unlike SourceTree.

    See more

    GitKraken is the best git client so far. The user interface is very friendly. Everything is easy to do with this tool. A branch tree vizualization is very clear. I've tried SourceTree and I got lost in such many panels. Also performance of SourceTree is not as goot as GitKraken. I like Sublime Merge but it doesn't have so many features as the other tools. I've choosen GitKraken and as bonus I got GitKraken Glo that is the next perfect tool.

    See more
    Git logo

    Git

    297.4K
    178.7K
    6.6K
    Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
    297.4K
    178.7K
    + 1
    6.6K
    PROS OF GIT
    • 1.4K
      Distributed version control system
    • 1.1K
      Efficient branching and merging
    • 959
      Fast
    • 845
      Open source
    • 726
      Better than svn
    • 368
      Great command-line application
    • 306
      Simple
    • 291
      Free
    • 232
      Easy to use
    • 222
      Does not require server
    • 27
      Distributed
    • 22
      Small & Fast
    • 18
      Feature based workflow
    • 15
      Staging Area
    • 13
      Most wide-spread VSC
    • 11
      Role-based codelines
    • 11
      Disposable Experimentation
    • 7
      Frictionless Context Switching
    • 6
      Data Assurance
    • 5
      Efficient
    • 4
      Just awesome
    • 3
      Github integration
    • 3
      Easy branching and merging
    • 2
      Compatible
    • 2
      Flexible
    • 2
      Possible to lose history and commits
    • 1
      Rebase supported natively; reflog; access to plumbing
    • 1
      Light
    • 1
      Team Integration
    • 1
      Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
    • 1
      Easy
    • 1
      Flexible, easy, Safe, and fast
    • 1
      CLI is great, but the GUI tools are awesome
    • 1
      It's what you do
    • 0
      Phinx
    CONS OF GIT
    • 16
      Hard to learn
    • 11
      Inconsistent command line interface
    • 9
      Easy to lose uncommitted work
    • 8
      Worst documentation ever possibly made
    • 5
      Awful merge handling
    • 3
      Unexistent preventive security flows
    • 3
      Rebase hell
    • 2
      Ironically even die-hard supporters screw up badly
    • 2
      When --force is disabled, cannot rebase
    • 1
      Doesn't scale for big data

    related Git posts

    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11.2M views

    Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

    • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
    • Respectively Git as revision control system
    • SourceTree as Git GUI
    • Visual Studio Code as IDE
    • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
    • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
    • SonarQube as quality gate
    • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
    • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
    • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
    • Heroku for deploying in test environments
    • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
    • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
    • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
    • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
    • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

    The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

    • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
    • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
    • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
    • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
    • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
    • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
    See more
    Tymoteusz Paul
    Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.8M views

    Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

    It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

    I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

    We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

    If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

    The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

    Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

    See more
    GitHub logo

    GitHub

    285.8K
    249.7K
    10.3K
    Powerful collaboration, review, and code management for open source and private development projects
    285.8K
    249.7K
    + 1
    10.3K
    PROS OF GITHUB
    • 1.8K
      Open source friendly
    • 1.5K
      Easy source control
    • 1.3K
      Nice UI
    • 1.1K
      Great for team collaboration
    • 867
      Easy setup
    • 504
      Issue tracker
    • 487
      Great community
    • 483
      Remote team collaboration
    • 449
      Great way to share
    • 442
      Pull request and features planning
    • 147
      Just works
    • 132
      Integrated in many tools
    • 122
      Free Public Repos
    • 116
      Github Gists
    • 113
      Github pages
    • 83
      Easy to find repos
    • 62
      Open source
    • 60
      Easy to find projects
    • 60
      It's free
    • 56
      Network effect
    • 49
      Extensive API
    • 43
      Organizations
    • 42
      Branching
    • 34
      Developer Profiles
    • 32
      Git Powered Wikis
    • 30
      Great for collaboration
    • 24
      It's fun
    • 23
      Clean interface and good integrations
    • 22
      Community SDK involvement
    • 20
      Learn from others source code
    • 16
      Because: Git
    • 14
      It integrates directly with Azure
    • 10
      Standard in Open Source collab
    • 10
      Newsfeed
    • 8
      Fast
    • 8
      Beautiful user experience
    • 8
      It integrates directly with Hipchat
    • 7
      Easy to discover new code libraries
    • 6
      Smooth integration
    • 6
      Integrations
    • 6
      Graphs
    • 6
      Nice API
    • 6
      It's awesome
    • 6
      Cloud SCM
    • 5
      Quick Onboarding
    • 5
      Remarkable uptime
    • 5
      CI Integration
    • 5
      Reliable
    • 5
      Hands down best online Git service available
    • 4
      Version Control
    • 4
      Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
    • 4
      Simple but powerful
    • 4
      Loved by developers
    • 4
      Free HTML hosting
    • 4
      Uses GIT
    • 4
      Security options
    • 4
      Easy to use and collaborate with others
    • 3
      Easy deployment via SSH
    • 3
      Ci
    • 3
      IAM
    • 3
      Nice to use
    • 2
      Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
    • 2
      Beautiful
    • 2
      Self Hosted
    • 2
      Issues tracker
    • 2
      Easy source control and everything is backed up
    • 2
      Never dethroned
    • 2
      All in one development service
    • 2
      Good tools support
    • 2
      Free HTML hostings
    • 2
      IAM integration
    • 2
      Very Easy to Use
    • 2
      Easy to use
    • 2
      Leads the copycats
    • 2
      Free private repos
    • 1
      Profound
    • 1
      Dasf
    CONS OF GITHUB
    • 55
      Owned by micrcosoft
    • 38
      Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
    • 15
      Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
    • 10
      API scoping could be better
    • 9
      Only 3 collaborators for private repos
    • 4
      Limited featureset for issue management
    • 3
      Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
    • 2
      GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
    • 1
      No multilingual interface
    • 1
      Takes a long time to commit
    • 1
      Expensive

    related GitHub posts

    Johnny Bell

    I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

    I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

    I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

    Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

    Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

    With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

    If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

    See more

    Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.

    Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!

    Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME

    Check out the GitHub repo attached

    See more
    Visual Studio Code logo

    Visual Studio Code

    179.4K
    163.6K
    2.3K
    Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft
    179.4K
    163.6K
    + 1
    2.3K
    PROS OF VISUAL STUDIO CODE
    • 340
      Powerful multilanguage IDE
    • 308
      Fast
    • 193
      Front-end develop out of the box
    • 158
      Support TypeScript IntelliSense
    • 142
      Very basic but free
    • 126
      Git integration
    • 106
      Intellisense
    • 78
      Faster than Atom
    • 53
      Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
    • 45
      Great Refactoring Tools
    • 44
      Good Plugins
    • 42
      Terminal
    • 38
      Superb markdown support
    • 36
      Open Source
    • 35
      Extensions
    • 26
      Awesome UI
    • 26
      Large & up-to-date extension community
    • 24
      Powerful and fast
    • 22
      Portable
    • 18
      Best code editor
    • 18
      Best editor
    • 17
      Easy to get started with
    • 15
      Lots of extensions
    • 15
      Good for begginers
    • 15
      Crossplatform
    • 15
      Built on Electron
    • 14
      Extensions for everything
    • 14
      Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
    • 14
      All Languages Support
    • 13
      Easy to use and learn
    • 12
      "fast, stable & easy to use"
    • 12
      Extensible
    • 11
      Ui design is great
    • 11
      Totally customizable
    • 11
      Git out of the box
    • 11
      Useful for begginer
    • 11
      Faster edit for slow computer
    • 10
      SSH support
    • 10
      Great community
    • 10
      Fast Startup
    • 9
      Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
    • 9
      Great language support
    • 9
      Powerful Debugger
    • 9
      It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
    • 8
      Can compile and run .py files
    • 8
      Python extension is fast
    • 7
      Features rich
    • 7
      Great document formater
    • 6
      He is not Michael
    • 6
      Extension Echosystem
    • 6
      She is not Rachel
    • 6
      Awesome multi cursor support
    • 5
      VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
    • 5
      Language server client
    • 5
      SFTP Workspace
    • 5
      Very proffesional
    • 5
      Easy azure
    • 4
      Has better support and more extentions for debugging
    • 4
      Supports lots of operating systems
    • 4
      Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
    • 4
      Virtualenv integration
    • 3
      Better autocompletes than Atom
    • 3
      Has more than enough languages for any developer
    • 3
      'batteries included'
    • 3
      More tools to integrate with vs
    • 3
      Emmet preinstalled
    • 2
      VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
    • 2
      CMake support with autocomplete
    • 2
      Microsoft
    • 2
      Customizable
    • 2
      Light
    • 2
      Big extension marketplace
    • 2
      Fast and ruby is built right in
    • 1
      File:///C:/Users/ydemi/Downloads/yuksel_demirkaya_webpa
    CONS OF VISUAL STUDIO CODE
    • 46
      Slow startup
    • 29
      Resource hog at times
    • 20
      Poor refactoring
    • 13
      Poor UI Designer
    • 11
      Weak Ui design tools
    • 10
      Poor autocomplete
    • 8
      Super Slow
    • 8
      Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
    • 8
      Microsoft sends telemetry data
    • 7
      Poor in PHP
    • 6
      It's MicroSoft
    • 3
      Poor in Python
    • 3
      No Built in Browser Preview
    • 3
      No color Intergrator
    • 3
      Very basic for java development and buggy at times
    • 3
      No built in live Preview
    • 3
      Electron
    • 2
      Bad Plugin Architecture
    • 2
      Powered by Electron
    • 1
      Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
    • 1
      Slow C++ Language Server

    related Visual Studio Code posts

    Yshay Yaacobi

    Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.

    Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.

    After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...

    See more
    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11.2M views

    Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

    • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
    • Respectively Git as revision control system
    • SourceTree as Git GUI
    • Visual Studio Code as IDE
    • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
    • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
    • SonarQube as quality gate
    • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
    • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
    • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
    • Heroku for deploying in test environments
    • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
    • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
    • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
    • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
    • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

    The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

    • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
    • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
    • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
    • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
    • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
    • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
    See more
    Docker logo

    Docker

    174.4K
    140.2K
    3.9K
    Enterprise Container Platform for High-Velocity Innovation.
    174.4K
    140.2K
    + 1
    3.9K
    PROS OF DOCKER
    • 823
      Rapid integration and build up
    • 692
      Isolation
    • 521
      Open source
    • 505
      Testa­bil­i­ty and re­pro­ducibil­i­ty
    • 460
      Lightweight
    • 218
      Standardization
    • 185
      Scalable
    • 106
      Upgrading / down­grad­ing / ap­pli­ca­tion versions
    • 88
      Security
    • 85
      Private paas environments
    • 34
      Portability
    • 26
      Limit resource usage
    • 17
      Game changer
    • 16
      I love the way docker has changed virtualization
    • 14
      Fast
    • 12
      Concurrency
    • 8
      Docker's Compose tools
    • 6
      Fast and Portable
    • 6
      Easy setup
    • 5
      Because its fun
    • 4
      Makes shipping to production very simple
    • 3
      It's dope
    • 3
      Highly useful
    • 2
      Does a nice job hogging memory
    • 2
      Open source and highly configurable
    • 2
      Simplicity, isolation, resource effective
    • 2
      MacOS support FAKE
    • 2
      Its cool
    • 2
      Docker hub for the FTW
    • 2
      HIgh Throughput
    • 2
      Very easy to setup integrate and build
    • 2
      Package the environment with the application
    • 2
      Super
    • 0
      Asdfd
    CONS OF DOCKER
    • 8
      New versions == broken features
    • 6
      Unreliable networking
    • 6
      Documentation not always in sync
    • 4
      Moves quickly
    • 3
      Not Secure

    related Docker posts

    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11.2M views

    Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

    • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
    • Respectively Git as revision control system
    • SourceTree as Git GUI
    • Visual Studio Code as IDE
    • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
    • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
    • SonarQube as quality gate
    • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
    • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
    • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
    • Heroku for deploying in test environments
    • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
    • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
    • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
    • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
    • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

    The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

    • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
    • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
    • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
    • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
    • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
    • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
    See more
    Tymoteusz Paul
    Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.8M views

    Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

    It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

    I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

    We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

    If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

    The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

    Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

    See more