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.

CI node leaderboard

This is a demonstration of a leaderboard of CI nodes that have opted into being on the board. For privacy reasons I won't publish node IDs whose owners haven't opted in. But the next version may have securely anonymized node identifiers for those who don't opt in.

Tell Lars if you want your CI node to be included.

Total 23561 CI runs across all nodes.

Pos Node ID Alias CI run count
1 z6Mki2ago1X2A5UWgKpoSxyCRLLhyZMwpam4T3EKvRmFTyuy callisto.liw.fi 4760
2 z6Mkfg8bP9CVPHYfHKiT4bkgrTdJvwFfxZCo48nYLjWmBvEp radicle.defelo.de 1322

Radicle CI use metrics

I 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 2026-08-19.

Repository Open issues Oldest issue Open patches Oldest patch
ambient-ci 55 over a year 1 3 months
radicle-ci-broker 84 over a year 1 4 days
radicle-ci-ambient 15 over a year 1 15 days
radicle-native-ci 0 0
rad-ci 3 6 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:

Date Time
September 23 07:00 UTC
September 30 16:00 UTC
October 7 skipped
October 14 16:00 UTC
October 21 07:00 UTC
October 28 17:00 UTC

Overview of the past month

For the next month, Lars has worked on fixing the issue backlogs in the various CI components. In addition, the tight coupling between Ambient and its adapter has been loosened: it is now no longer necessary to update the adapter every time an action or log message in Ambient changes.

Further, an as yet unreleased change is that the adapter is rewritten for much simplicity. The new version is half the code.

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:

  • Open callisto.liw.fi for projects using Python or Go or anything else that works there now.
  • Fix Ambient so that it can handle Debian security updates.
  • Continue fixing issues from the backlog. There are too many issues still open and this makes it hard to manage the lists.

Notes

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

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

Links