GoCD vs. Mercurial

Previously, our team used Jenkins. However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.

Incentivized

If you generally think that to develop software you have to choose one repository, then in my opinion you have to choose between Mercurial and Git, there is not other solution. Mercurial also has a good merge tool which i can recommend. This gives you the flexibility to push just the "part of the feature", and is much better suited in the case where the "part of feature" and some other "part of the feature" both contain changes to the same file.

Incentivized

• Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM.
• The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones.
• Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems.

Incentivized

• Branch
• Distributed architecture
• Stable
• Platform independent

Incentivized

• UI can be improved
• Location for settings can be re-arranged
• API for setting up pipeline

Incentivized

• Integration with visual studio
• More integrated tools
• When I install Mercurial I always have to do a hard restart of my computer.

Incentivized

GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.

Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.

Incentivized

When we chose Mercurial it was more popular from perspectives than Git and we have too many problems with the Microsoft team foundation solution. We also want to move from a centralized version of source control to a distributed one. We also were working more and more via the Internet with our source control so distributed version was only solution.

Incentivized

• ROI has been good since it's open source
• Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines
• More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date

Incentivized

• Improve time in merging
• Branching enables us to keep separate version per customer
• Good tool for programmers is sometimes a reason to stay

Incentivized