For a personal project, I’m trying out RunCodeRun, a service for doing automated builds for projects on github.

I think the idea is a good one. For gems or simple web apps without complicated integration tests, getting an automated build up and running is dead simple. It’s just a matter of adding a post-commit hook to your github project to notify runcoderun that the code has been updated.

I’ve run into a few issues with missing gems on the build machine, but they’ve been incredibly responsive. After posting a support request to install a gem, they not installed the gem I requested; they also installed a gem I didn’t know was missing, forked my project to fix a gem dependency problem and a database configuration problem, and sent me a pull request. This is all within 24 hours, and for a service I’m not even paying for!

The service is free for Open Source code, but they have a paid build option for private projects with dedicated build resources. I haven’t used the paid service, so I’m not sure to what extent they support more complex requirements like multiple database connections, system services (Sphinx), and distributed systems.

Hopefully, if Relevance is dedicating the resources to provide such great support, they’ll also be improving the flexibility of the service for more complex builds. I doubt it would work in its current state for my current professional work, but I’d love to be able to easily outsource my builds.