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

This month in Radicle CI, June 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 2026-06-17.

Repository Open issues Oldest issue Open patches Oldest patch
ambient-ci 68 over a year 2 3 months
radicle-ci-broker 86 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:

  • June 24 at 16:00 UTC
  • July 1 at 07:00 UTC
  • July 8 at 16:00 UTC
  • July 15 skipped
  • July 22 skipped
  • July 29 at 07:00 UTC

Overview of the past month

For the next month, Lars has worked on:

  • CI broker:
    • releases 0.28.0 and 0.28.1 to improve logspam of unhandled events, job COB spam from test instances, and deploying a CI node on Debian
  • Ambient:
    • Stateless OpenPGP support: have a list of possibilities to try.
    • document rsync_target_base and rsync_target_map and software architecture
    • trusted virtual machines for pre-plan and post-plan actions
    • improved error messages then tar fails: the stderr is now shown
    • maximum size of dependencies directory
  • Ambient adapter:
    • update and adapt to some new dependencies
    • print all underlying errors
    • admin log filenames are not more precise, to avoid multiple runs using the same file

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:

  • Finish the "trusted VM" work.
  • Add pre-plan actions for Python, Rust toolchains, maybe other ecosystems.
  • Update CI components to depend on current version of the radicle crate.
  • Make releases of CI components.
  • Add a non-Rust project to callisto to verify new stuff 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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