dagger VS gitlab-ci-local

Pipelines-as-code with Tekton, GitHub Actions, or even Dagger

1. Dagger — The CI/CD Brain Docker Always Wanted

mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/) and dagger (https://github.com/dagger/dagger) seem like nice candidates too!

Mise can install all your deps, and run tasks

While YAML has been a traditional choice for defining pipelines, Python SDKs like Dagger provide developers with programmatic control. Instead of static files, you can write functions to configure, test, and deploy applications dynamically.

uh-huh: https://github.com/earthly/earthly/blob/v0.8.15/LICENSE (MPLv2, just like TF used to be) https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/v0.15.2/LICENSE (Apache 2)

I commend anyone who’s taking a hard look at our current CI/CD practices. Good work! Succinctly stating the problems is easier said than done.

I believe https://dagger.io checks all these manifesto boxes and more. At least that’s where I’m focusing my attention.

A standout presentation came from Paul Dragoonis about Dagger, a programmable CI/CD engine created by the author of Docker, Solomon Hykes. The talk illustrated how PHP developers can leverage Dagger to define their CI/CD pipelines as code, creating and managing Docker containers programmatically, a significant step forward for PHP deployment automation.

I don't want to yuck your yum, since it seems like this solved your problem for your crew. However, I always value launch posts like this which have a "why not ..." section, since (a) it helps folks who want to adopt your toy to understand its tradeoffs and know if they are the right tradeoffs for the adopter (b) it shows that the system was at least plausibly well designed and not filled with "oh, is that a thing?!" which requires abandoning it shortly after stumbling on real problems (I think of this as "The JavaScript Framework Lifecycle")

For example, this sure does look like Dagger <https://github.com/dagger/dagger#what-is-dagger> in its use of golang-as-ci <https://docs.dagger.io/quickstart/daggerize#construct-a-pipe...> and plausibly "run ci locally"

Dagger doesn't ship with a dashboard (that I know of) but I also struggle to think of why one would want an artisanal dashboard when <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/de...> and <https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/environments/index.html> exist in close proximity to the existing CI infrastructure. I guess if one is trying to be "CI agnostic" but my life experience is that trying to be CI agnostic leads to a lot of NIH which one cannot hire for and cannot take to the next job

Looks like Dagger has a Rust SDK [0]! Going to give it a try.

[0] https://github.com/dagger/dagger/tree/main/sdk/rust

If you are annoyed by gitlab-runner deprecating run command that I used to run pipelines locally, there is https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local . But it also opened my eyes to benefita of having runner invariant pipelines -- pipelines written in solution agnostic way. Use bash, make, just, doit or whatever.

Nothing beats having a single script to bootstrap and run the whole pipeline e.g. `make ci`.

Oh, yeah, I remember looking at that a while back. I don't recall how much it had implemented at the time but it seems that firecow took a vastly different approach than nektos/act did, going so far as to spend what must have been an enormous amount of time/energy to cook up https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local/blob/4.56.2/src/s... (and, of course, choosing a dynamically typed language versus golang)

Among these options, the one that has gained the most traction is gitlab-ci-local :

The main reason behind this change is to have consistent scripts for local testing and remote runners during testing and debugging. However, there are already tools available, such as gitlab-ci-local, that allow you to run jobs locally, partially invalidating this argument. Additionally, working locally may not provide access to all necessary variables.

Two tools I've used for local Gitlab CI runs: - https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local - https://gitlab.com/AdrianDC/gitlabci-local

What you might want to look at is this, to meet both needs https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local exists but its not quite there yet. Personally Ive resorted to setting up a self-managed instance at home, relying on the included linter/validator and pushing repeatedly as before.

If you already have/had a working pipeline then maybe https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local has something worth looking at.

> One thing that would be nice, however, would be the ability to run the entire pipeline locally.

This cost me many hours of waiting for the Gitlab CI runner when debugging non-trivial pipelines, when the issue was something that did not have to do with the script steps inside of the jobs but rather how the Gitlab runner handled things.

I've found gitlab-ci-local [1] which actually does run the Gitlab pipeline locally, although I had to write some boilerplaye scripts to set up all the necessary 'CI_FOO_SOMETHING' environment variables before running the tool. (Which sometimes came back to bite me because the issue was actually in the content of some of those environment variables). It's still a very good tool.

[1] https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local