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.

Issues and patches

As of 2026-06-17.

Repository Open issues Oldest issue Open patches Oldest patch
ambient-ci 69 over a year 1 2 months
radicle-ci-broker 89 over a year 0
radicle-ci-ambient 15 over a year 1
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:

Date Time
July 29 07:00 UTC
August 5 16:00 UTC
August 12 07:00 UTC
August 19 16:00 UTC
August 26 07:00 UTC
September 2 16:00 UTC

Overview of the past month

For the next month, Lars has worked on:

  • CI broker:
    • releases 0.29.0 and 0.30.0 to allow NOT updating job COBs, to configure web page auto-refresh interval, reduce log spam, and include installation / update support
  • Ambient:
    • releases 0.15.0 and 0.16.0 to add "trusted VM" support for executing pre- and post-plan actions in virtual machines with network access, rather than directly on the host
    • this led to the HTML run log generation code being rewritten, hopefully resulting in logs that are easier to understand
    • also, Git configuration moved to its own action, rsync and debian artifact directory creation, and various other improvements
  • Ambient adapter:
    • releases 0.20.0, 0.21.0, and 0.21.1 improve logging, admin log filenames, and updated dependencies

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:

  • Verify actions for downloading Python and Go dependencies work, and make a release that includes them. Also, add an action to download the necessary Rust toolchain, with components. Make a release that include these and broaden the scope of callito.liw.fi to allow Python and Go open source projects in addition to Rust ones.
  • Rewrite rad-ci so it's less tightly coupled with adapter implementations.

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.

Links