Shippable Reviews & Product Details

It is one the best website for those are doing some project. It is integrated with github. Customizable dashboard. Very easy to find somethig related to project. Docker is best one. I think it is better to use docker sometimes Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Docker has some limitations which should be removed. Project deployment take more than needed time sometimes. There are minor bugs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is best service available for developers. Dockers is best product. There are so much features available in dockers. it uses less ram. It has integrations of various repositories like github and gitlab. It is easy to deploy our project. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dockers is not isolated like VMs. It is bit expensive to those who are beginners. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Best place for students and professionals those who are working on project. We can explore different projects. We can easily deploy our project. Api integration is good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dashboard can be improved. It is little expensive as per need. Deployment takes more time. GUI can be improved Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Build on your own host - Developers can set up Docker containers on their own servers and run Shippable in there. So, you dont need to store your data in external servers, giving better security and savings.

2. Configuration file to describe builds - Builds are described in the shippable.yml file located in the root of your project. So, its more flexible and also can be stored in you code repository as it is just a plain-text file. That is, even the config code can be versioned and reviewed later. If you are coming from Travis CI, Shippable reads your .travis.yml file directly so you can try it out directly - this is a pretty nifty feature.

3. Docker integration - Shippable is built using Docker, a popular 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. Running on docker means creating and destoring build environments are always a pleasure and there is no chance for any leftover from previous version.

4. It also supports testing against multiple runtimes, versions and environments for eg. different versions of the language, library and OS. So, it lets you test the code more thoroughly in many scenarios. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 and should be fixed in the future. Although it is doable with config file, it is harder to achieve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like Shippable because it is a all-in-one solution for our build,packaging and deployment needs. It is easy to configure the .yml file to test the project from source code, build and package it into a binary if the tests pass and then automatically deploy it to test or master environments. It lets you automatically tag the package with version information and store all the versions for future access and rollback.

It is easy to think of it just as a deployment solution, but it also has support for test reports and a dashboard to monitor the status of previous tests and change of coverage percentage. This helps in keeping a quick tab on many projects without having to go into all the projects and analyze manually.

I also like that they have administrative permission manager to control unauthorised access from third parties that you integrate with the project. The test results can be made public without storing the keyfiles publicly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Overall, I am impressed with the number of things they have added over time, but I would like to have integration with some more services like Heroku and DigitalOcean. It is doable with SSH, but a better solution is preferred. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Shippable offers developers the ability to automate their workflow, from code review to production rollout, all without writing a single line of code. The build and deploy scripts have to be written in a separate config file which is stored alongwih the code files. This is good for portability

Shippable takes over the moment a developer pushes some code into a repository, managing all the steps needed to push the code into production. It is all automatic and no interaction is needed to build new versions, it is all trigerred by the git push into the code repository

At its core, the platform offers developers a unified, Docker (container-based) application delivery pipeline for heterogeneous source control systems, making it well-suited to unit testing, functional testing for those deploying microservices, stress testing, or security testing. The platform also supports both script and UI-based pipelines. Scripts are more configurable, whereas the visual pipelines are better for simpler cases and provides more insight into he process for everyone. I prefer the second approach for most of our projects.

Also, a feature called Lighthouse allows users to “subscribe” to a Docker image and be notified of any changes, regardless of who manages it. If a change is detected, This is again good because the developers can know that the development environment and not the codebase itself has changed. Builds triggered due to this then should be analysed separately as it is more likely a problem with the changes made in the docker image. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Because it is a Docker based solution, standard restrictions on those images always apply. So, it is often hard to find proper libraries with the required version. Even then, as the environment is created and destroyed everytime, it takes some time on every run to create the env. For non-docker based solutions, it can be cached between runs, giving a faster startup time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use Shippable as Continuous Integration provider for our enterprise because we like -

A. Swap VM provider with Azure or Google APP Engine - Default VM provided by Shippable is shared in nature and unacceptable for us in terms of throughput. But, good thing is they support using other VM providers like Amazon Web Services or Google APP Engine as backend. We use AWS cluster with parallel testing to reduce our test durations.

B. Docker-focused - We have not completely moved to Docker, but we are testing docker-based project for a new client and Shippable seems to have good support for Docker. Docker hubs, both official and others are supported, their docker provisioning is fast and automatically managed. Docker configurations can be provided easily via UI, without changing code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. No support for older programming languages like C++ and Java are provided. So, we choose Shippable only for newer projects.

2. No self VM provider - Our custom servers cant be used with Shippable as they dont provide self-hosting options. We prefer self-hosted enterprise plans because of our large developer base. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Shippable is one of the very few CI servers which support only Docker-based or containerised testing/deployment. So, if you are not in that target demographic, you're out of luck. But if you do use Docker, Shippable packs quite a punch and brings fresh approach to the process. Its not a whole lot customisable, but covers a lot of ground with one-click integration with external services.

Things that I like about Shippable

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1. Visual Continuous Delivery Pipelines - Usual method for setting up the flow in most CI servers is to write bash code for all the parts of the process in a single file, but Shippable is totally the opposite. You have a nice timeline-like UI where you can activate different service cartridges like databases, programming languages, notification services, AWS deployment, etc. The whole flow is divided into different parts like CI, CD and notification.

2. Huge range of deployment integrations - Supports direct integration with AWS Elastic Beanstalk (EB), Heroku, Openshift, DigitalOcean and more. Because everything is specified in the pipeline visually, they need to provide deployment adapters for many services and they do a very good job at it.

3. Supports many databases and languages within container - Although docker is nice for running everything separately, its success depends on how modular the images can be made. If a lot of things need to be installed at container startup, it is going to be as slow as traditional VMs. So, most databases and languages are modularised into cartridges you can activate externally.

4. Very affordable pricing even for large organisations - The basic account is free, but parallel testing for many containers or multiple deployments from the same pipeline costs $10 for each extra item. Even after 20 of each, the total price comes to about $400 which is ultra cheap considering the volume of such organisations.

5. Separate pipeline for separate branches in code repositories are supported.

6. SSH login for test debugging is very useful when the bugs are not reproducible in local machines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest problem is that their available market segment is too small, because Docker is still not that mainstream for testing in most organisations. In its defence, it is very docker-oriented by choice and is quite good for this niche segment.

Other than that, some things I didn't like about it :

1. Very limited support for notification services - Only Hipchat and Slack are supported. Some more like Gitter, Email and IRC support would be nice.

2. Slow test run for basic accounts - Tests for a decent sized project can be very slow if parallel workers are not used.

3. Configuration via both UI (pipelines) and config file is a bit confusing for beginners. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Shippable is quite different from the competition - that is the first thing that came to my mind while trying to use it. They have innovated a lot to woo both single developers and enterprises alike.

I like a few things about it:

A. Multi-language support with docker focus - Shippable is not a docker-only nor a docker-unaware platform. It detects the primary programming language of the project very swiftly, and if the project is docker-based, it picks up the docker settings too and spins up a container for the deployment process. It is quite easy to mistakenly assume that Shippable is only for docker projects, but it is not - it just integrates very well with them. Language support is quite good with python, node.js and others on the menu.

B. BYOH (Bring your own host) approach - This is where the marriage between enterprise and single users come into play - If you don't like the default VMs provided by Shippable as your testing and building platform, you can swap them out for any Azure, DigitalOcean, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine or Heroku instance for custom experience. You can also use your on-premises architecture along with the hosted ones to get the best of both worlds. Developers want to use the popular services as VM provider and enterprises want to use their own machines for the best experience.

C. Debugging - Full access to console output for every test/build and SSH access into those machines really help in debugging when the tests fail for some unknown reason.

D. Auto-configuration from popular test config files - While setting things up, I just activated build for one project without configuring anything for Shippable. This project already had Travis and Circle CI set up for proper testing. Now, I reasonably expected this build to fail with something like "No tests found", but to my surprise it recognised one of those config files and ran all the test commands successfully. Although the test results were not collected, it was overall a pleasant surprise for me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Shippable is overall quite nice, but I think there are still some small shortcomings that needs to be addressed -

A. Default VM was very slow to start up, took more than 2 minutes. This is quite slow compared to the competition.

B. Databases and other services are hard to install in non-dockerised test environments.

C. Not all parts of standard test config files are automatically recognised by Shippable. For eg. apt-get <packagename> is not automatically detected. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the build speed as it is based on Docker and it's web hooks integration with BitBucket for reporting build status which posted by BitBucket to Slack. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes builds hang-on at node provisioning step and it generally takes a long time to complete this step. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.