dagger VS nix

Compare dagger vs nix and see what are their differences.

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dagger nix
92 366
9,986 10,621
4.1% 7.1%
9.9 10.0
about 12 hours ago 2 days ago
Go C++
Apache License 2.0 GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

dagger

Posts with mentions or reviews of dagger. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-15.
  • Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    Since there are a plethora of dagger projects, lazyweb: https://github.com/dagger/dagger#readme

    They also recently released their "github actions" replacement <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39550431> but holy hell their documentation is just aggressively bad

    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    The fact that I couldn't point to one page on the docs that shows the tl;dr or the what problem is this solving

    https://docs.dagger.io/quickstart/562821/hello just emits "Hello, world!" which is fantastic if you're writing a programming language but less helpful if you're trying to replace a CI/CD pipeline. Then, https://docs.dagger.io/quickstart/292472/arguments doubles down on that fallacy by going whole hog into "if you need printf in your pipline, dagger's got your back". The subsequent pages have a lot of english with little concrete examples of what's being shown.

    I summarized my complaint in the linked thread as "less cowsay in the examples" but to be honest there are upteen bazillion GitHub Actions out in the world, not the very least of which your GHA pipelines use some https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/v0.10.2/.github/workfl... https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/v0.10.2/.github/workfl... so demonstrate to a potential user how they'd run any such pipeline in dagger, locally, or in Jenkins, or whatever by leveraging reusable CI functions that setup go or run trivy

    Related to that, I was going to say "try incorporating some of the dagger that builds dagger" but while digging up an example, it seems that dagger doesn't make use of the functions yet <https://github.com/dagger/dagger/tree/v0.10.2/ci#readme> which is made worse by the perpetual reference to them as their internal codename of Zenith. So, even if it's not invoked by CI yet, pointing to a WIP PR or branch or something to give folks who have CI/CD problems in their head something concrete to map into how GHA or GitLabCI or Jenkins or something would go a long way

  • Testcontainers
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    > GHA has "service containers", but unfortunately the feature is too basic to address real-world use cases: it assumes a container image can just … boot! … and only talk to the code via the network. Real world use cases often require serialized steps between the test & the dependencies, e.g., to create or init database dirs, set up certs, etc.)

    My biased recommendation is to write a custom Dagger function, and run it in your GHA workflow. https://dagger.io

    If you find me on the Dagger discord, I will gladly write a code snippet summarizing what I have in mind, based on what you explained of your CI stack. We use GHA ourselves and use this pattern to great effect.

    Disclaimer: I work there :)

  • BuildKit in depth: Docker's build engine explained
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Feb 2024
    Dagger (https://dagger.io) is a great way to use BuildKit through language SDKs. It's such a better paradigm, I cannot imagine going back.

    Dagger is by the same folks that brought us Docker. This is their fresh take on solving the problem of container building and much more. BuildKit can more than build images and Dagger unlocks it for you.

  • Cloud, why so difficult? 🤷‍♀️
    3 projects | dev.to | 24 Jan 2024
    And suddenly, it's almost painfully obvious where all the pain came from. Cloud applications today are simply a patchwork of disconnected pieces. I have a compiler for my infrastructure, another for my functions, another for my containers, another for my CI/CD pipelines. Each one takes its job super seriously, and keeps me safe and happy inside each of these machines, but my application is not running on a single machine anymore, my application is running on the cloud.
  • Share your DevOps setups
    6 projects | /r/selfhosted | 7 Dec 2023
    That said I've been moving my CI/CD to https://dagger.io/ which has been FANTASTIC. It's code based so you can define all your pipelines in Go, Python, or Javascript and they all run on containers so I can run actions locally without any special setup. Highly recommended.
  • What’s with DevOps engineers using `make` of all things?
    17 projects | /r/devops | 6 Dec 2023
    You are right make is arcane. But it gets the job done. There are new exciting things happening in this area. Check out https://dagger.io.
  • Shellcheck finds bugs in your shell scripts
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Nov 2023
    > but I'm not convinced it's ready to replace Gitlab CI.

    The purpose of Dagger it's not to replace your entire CI (Gitlab in your case). As you can see from our website (https://dagger.io/engine), it works and integrates with all the current CI providers. Where Dagger really shines is to help you and your teams move all the artisanal scripts encoded in YAML into actual code and run them in containers through a fluent SDK which can be written in your language of choice. This unlocks a lot of benefits which are detailed in our docs (https://docs.dagger.io/).

    > Dagger has one very big downside IMO: It does not have native integration with Gitlab, so you end up having to use Docker-in-Docker and just running dagger as a job in your pipeline.

    This is not correct. Dagger doesn't depend on Docker. We're just conveniently using Docker (and other container runtimes) as it's generally available pretty much everywhere by default as a way to bootstrap the Dagger Engine. You can read more about the Dagger architecture here: https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/main/core/docs/d7yxc-o...

    As you can see from our docs (https://docs.dagger.io/759201/gitlab-google-cloud/#step-5-cr...), we're leveraging the *default* Gitlab CI `docker` service to bootstrap the engine. There's no `docker-in-docker` happening there.

    > It clumps all your previously separated steps into a single step in the Gitlab pipeline.

    This is also not the case, we should definitely improve our docs to reflect that. You can organize your dagger pipelines in multiple functions and call them in separate Gitlab jobs as you're currently doing. For example, you can do the following:

    ```.gitlab-ci.yml

  • Cicada – A FOSS, Cross-Platform Version of GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Nov 2023
    Check out https://dagger.io/. Write declarative pipelines in code, reproducibly run anywhere.
  • Show HN: Togomak – declarative pipeline orchestrator based on HCL and Terraform
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023
    Is this similar to Dagger[1] ?

    [1] https://dagger.io

nix

Posts with mentions or reviews of nix. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.
  • Tools for Linux Distro Hoppers
    7 projects | dev.to | 27 Mar 2024
    Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.
  • Go + Hypermedia - A Learning Journey (Part 1)
    6 projects | dev.to | 23 Feb 2024
    1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity
  • What it was like working for Gitlab
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2024
    Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is really really easy for you to run out of VirtualBox or Parallels or something for this reason. No matter where you go, you know you can have a suite of tools which work just as you want them to there. Being able to tear it down and rebuild it quickly is also a great way to deal with debugging certain kinds of problems of the "it runs/doesn't run on my machine" category.

    How you do this is of course up to you. At one end of the spectrum is just relying on your memory. At the other end is using NixOS https://nixos.org/ to get fully reproducible builds anywhere you go. Between these are a vast field of options. I know a guy who maintains an Ansible file set to `host: localhost` which installs everything he wants from that file. For me, I just stick with the latest Ubuntu version and maintain a few shell scripts [1] that install 80% of what I like to have on a new install.

    If you like the scientific approach, you can install something like https://atuin.sh/ and do some statistics on what programs you actually run most frequently based on your long term shell history.

    [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

  • Cloudflare R2-Backed Nix Binary Cache on Fly.io
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    See https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/838 for making content-addressed derivations supported by hydra.nixos.org. At that point, we can actually try out the XP feature at scale.

    Also see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/8919 for this accepted RFC

    Once those things are done, we can get back to merging in the IPFS code.

    Now that there is an Nix team and I am on it, there is much, much less of an issue of these experiments being caught in limbo :).

  • The one thing I do not like about the Nix package manager (and a fix for it)
    3 projects | dev.to | 16 Jan 2024
    The nix package manager is an awesome package manager for linux and macos, which focuses on declarative packages. This means that you can dump out all the packages you want into a file, and nix will go out and fetch them for you.
  • NixOS: Declarative Builds and Deployments
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2024
  • Beginners Intro to Trunk Based Development
    4 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).
  • Practical Guide to Trunk Based Development
    4 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:
  • How I use Nix in my Elm projects
    8 projects | dev.to | 19 Dec 2023
    Nix is a tool that allows you to make reproducible development environments. I've started using it in all my Elm side projects and I've had a good experience with it thus far. To pique your curiosity I just wanted to share my simple setup that has been working quite well for me.
  • Shopware Changes since the 6.0 Dev Training Videos
    5 projects | dev.to | 12 Dec 2023
    The latter one is based on nix OS using Symfony flex recipes and PHP packagist composer. The flex devenv should work cross-platform on Linux, Windows, and Mac. "The main difference to other tools like Docker or a VM is that it neither uses containerization nor virtualization techniques. Instead, the services run natively on your machine."

What are some alternatives?

When comparing dagger and nix you can also consider the following projects:

earthly - Super simple build framework with fast, repeatable builds and an instantly familiar syntax – like Dockerfile and Makefile had a baby.

asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more

distrobox - Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox

void-packages - The Void source packages collection

flatpak - Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework

homebrew-emacs-plus - Emacs Plus formulae for the Homebrew package manager

pipeline - A cloud-native Pipeline resource.

guix - Read-only mirror of GNU Guix — pull requests are ignored, see https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/en/guix.html#Submitting-Patches instead

NixOS-docker - DEPRECATED! Dockerfiles to package Nix in a minimal docker container

build-emacs-for-macos - Somewhat hacky script to automate building of Emac.app on macOS.

gitlab-ci-local - Tired of pushing to test your .gitlab-ci.yml?

nix-darwin - nix modules for darwin