Update on the GitHub Actions evaluation

The infrastructure team is happy to report that the evaluation we started last year of GitHub Actions as the new CI platform for the rust-lang/rust repository is making progress!

On March 20th, 2020 we merged PR #70190 , adding the GitHub Actions configuration to the compiler repository. We’re still gating merges on the existing Azure Pipelines setup, but running the two providers side by side allows us to find bugs in the GitHub Actions configuration without impacting the work of our contributors.

Once all outstanding issues are fixed, the Infrastructure Team will make the decision to either switch to GitHub Actions or stay on Azure Pipelines. We expect the decision to happen in a couple of months.

What’s changing with GitHub Actions?

This change should have no visible effect to any user of Rust, but will greatly improve the experience of our contributors.

The main difference our contributors are going to notice is a big reduction of our CI times. In the current Azure Pipelines setup builds regularly take more than 3 hours to finish (with 60 parallel 2-core VMs), while we expect the new GitHub Actions setup to take less than half the time to finish a build, thanks to a dedicated pool of 8-core VMs GitHub generously prepared for us.

Another technical change is that we’re now running most CI builds on the rust-lang-ci/rust fork. This should only impact team members that want to get a list of all the past builds, and should be completly transparent to everyone else thanks to our integration bot @bors .

What configuration is the project using?

Our CI configuration is available at src/ci/github-actions/ci.yml . Note that our configuration is not using the standard GitHub Actions syntax, but we’re relying on a preprocessor to expand YAML anchors to ease the maintenance work on our end.

Why are you moving away from Azure Pipelines?

We're happy with Azure Pipelines as a product, but both Microsoft and GitHub asked us to try GitHub Actions as it's more closely integrated into the GitHub workflow we already use. After we used it for a while in other repositories we were satisfied enough to start evaluating a migration for rust-lang/rust .