This month in Radicle CI, 2026-02
Current status
Office hours
Overview of the past month
Goals for 2026
Future plans
Notes
Links

This month in Radicle CI, 2026-02

This is a monthly newsletter about the current state of Radicle CI, what has happened recently, and near future plans.

Current status

Radicle CI is in production use. There are several CI nodes, and Lars runs a public one for open source Rust projects at https://callisto.liw.fi/.

Issues and patches

As of 2026-02-17.

Repository	Open issues	Oldest issue	Open patches	Oldest patch
`ambient-ci`	48	11 months	0
`radicle-ci-broker`	70	over a year	0
`radicle-ci-ambient`	10	over a year	1	11 months
`radicle-native-ci`	0		0
`rad-ci`	4	11 months	0

Office hours

The Radicle CI office hour is a place where anyone can show up and ask questions about Radicle CI or Radicle or anything related to them. Sometimes Lars or someone else will have a demo or a short talk.

This happens weekly at https://meet.ffmuc.net/radicleciofficehour. It's Jitsi and you only need a web browser and mic, camera is optional.

Each office hour is announced on #Annoncements and #radicle-ci on the Radicle Zulip, and on Lars' fediverse account (@liw@toot.liw.fi).

Upcoming:

February 18 at 17 UTC
February 25 at 08 UTC
March 4 at 17 UTC
March 11 at 08 UTC

Overview of the past month

Ambient CI version 0.12.0, released 2026-02-05

From NEWS.md:

New feature:

Ambient (ambient run) now produces run logs in JSON Lines format (one JSON object per line of output). This can be turned into HTML pages using ambient log --format=html. The HTML page is supposed to easier to navigate than tens to thousands of kilobytes of unstructured text. It is expected that the HTML logs can still be improved. They are included in a release so that the Ambient developers can get feedback on how to improve them.

The parts where things fail are colored pink in the HTML log. Advice on better colors and other ways to distinguish is most welcome.

To see the new logs, see https://callisto.liw.fi/ after this release has been deployed there. That should happen within an hour or two after it's been uploaded to crates.io.

Old run logs (run.log in the project state directory) are no longer understood by this version of Ambient.

Changed features:

The deb and deb2 actions log the package directory they create or that it already exists. This helps debugging via CI run logs.

Bug fixes:

In the deb2 action, if the /ci/artifacts/debian directory doesn't exist, create it. Although the deb and deb2 actions share code, this doesn't change anything for deb, as it puts the built package in /ci/artifacts, which always exists.

The end of year holidays happened, and fairly little has happened in Radicle CI development over the past month.

Goals for 2026

The primary goal for Radicle CI in 2026 is to get more people using it. To achieve this, much work is needed to improve awareness, documentation, installation, configuration, and operation. Some feature work and bug fixing will also be needed. While the basics work and are in use, things could be much more polished.

In addition, a supporting goal is to start tracking how much Radicle CI is used, based on job COBs.

Future plans

For the next month, Lars plans to work on:

A prototype for a new tool to collect data on CI runs in Radicle repositories.
Improve Ambient run logs.
Improve installation of Radicle CI with Ambient.
Change Ambient to support generic cloud images well.
Make Radicle CI components build in a reproducible way.

Support for generic cloud images means using an image meant to run a virtual machine in the cloud with Ambient. Many Linux distributions publish such images. They are meant to be set up on first boot using cloud-init, which Ambient supports. However, there are missing bit that make using them not a good option yet.

Notes

If you have an open source Rust project and want to try Radicle and Ambient on callisto, see https://callisto.liw.fi/callisto/ for instructions.