blog.liw.fi → posts → 2026 → State of Radicle CI and where it's going: May 2026

This month in Radicle CI, May 2026

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 callisto.liw.fi.

Radicle CI use metrics

I now track Radicle CI use by counting job COBs that reach a public seed node run by Adrian. The data below excludes CI runs on my own CI nodes, to avoid skewing the numbers. I run CI a lot, as part of developing Radicle CI.

The data is collected in the job-cob-data repository by the job-cob-counts software.

(I've dropped the table with exact numbers until I automate that.)

Issues and patches

As of 2026-03-16.

Repository Open issues Oldest issue Open patches Oldest patch
ambient-ci 70 over a year 1 2 months
radicle-ci-broker 82 over a year 0
radicle-ci-ambient 13 over a year 0
radicle-native-ci 0 0
rad-ci 8 over a year 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:

  • May 20 at 07:00 UTC
  • May 27 at 16:00 UTC
  • June 3 at 07:00 UTC
  • June 10 at 16:00 UTC
  • June 17 at 07:00 UTC
  • June 24 at 16:00 UTC

Overview of the past month

For the next month, Lars has worked on:

Some other work also got done, but not much visible.

Radicle CI component releases

Ambient adapter (radicle-ci-ambient) version 0.19.0, released 2026-05-13

  • The adapter admin logs can be one run per file, if the log configuration field refers to a directory.

  • Update dependency on rustls-webpki to a version without known vulnerabilities.

Goals for 2026 (unchanged)

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 the following:

  • Make installation of Radicle CI easier.
    • add systemd units for the components
    • write a shell script to provision a fresh Debian host as a CI node
  • Change Ambient to run pre- and post-plan actions in a separate virtual machine, with network access, to contain problems if an action implementation is flawed.
  • Add a non-Rust project to callisto to verify that works, then open it up for non-Rust projects.

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.

Once Ambient supports more than Rust, callisto will accept non-Rust projects, too. But still only open source projects.

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