cloak VS dagger

SEEKING FOUNDER CEO | Dev Tools | CEO Co-founder | Worldwide | MVP

Lookign for

Someone with experience taking a product to market, someone willing to trade equity for MAUs.

Idea

https://cloak.software/

Current Progress

Ready to onboard users but still a few issues to iron out.

Contact

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianpurton

Hi. I'm also working on an E2E secrets manager. https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak

A few tips.

1. It looks like I'm able to do account enumeration on your login page. For a secure app you want to make sure this is not possible.

You want to take a look at Earthly. https://earthly.dev/

This gives you a mix of docker and a makefile.

The best bit is you can test your pipeline locally and you are vendor agnostic.

I'm using it here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak

I commit to a github repo and that gets deployed to cloudflare pages. https://pages.cloudflare.com/

I use Zola the static site generator. My repo is here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/tree/main/www

You can see my migrations to switch on RLS here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/blob/main/db/migrations/20220808094314_tenancy_isolation.sql

Hi we are running selenium tests in our CI/CD pipeline.

We do actually generate a video of the tests running as an example see here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/actions/runs/2787628672

We're not using cypress we use webdriver connected to a selenium docker instance.

Is that something you can connect to?

I can give you a concrete example if that helps.

I looked at the "secrets automation" space and my background is cryptography and web development.

I'm a solo developer so when I look at a problem I have to make the solution small enough that I can actually build it.

I also have to have an idea about how I will get people to use my product i.e. marketing.

In my case 1Password raised 620million in funding based on their acquisition of Secretshub which for me proves there is a market in secrets automation for developers.

I looked at the secretshub product and I was confident I could build it better with easier to use encryption and make it open source.

As the market is developers I feel writing blog articles about software development will give me a route to market.

So I started about 4 months ago. The product is now here https://cloak.software and source code is here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak

My first article about web development with rust has already had 16K views so I'm confident with the marketing approach. Now the hard works starts of turning visitors into paying users.

Hope this helps.

I've just launched an MVP for a solution to this problem. https://cloak.software/

I've been using Earthly for about 6 months.

Earthly uses Dockerfile style syntax so I don't have to learn a new language, I can leverage my existing knowledge.

Another advantage is that in Earthly I can run up a docker compose within my pipeline so that I have selenium, envoy and postgres running for integration testing.

You can see my integration tests here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak/blob/main/Earthfile#L14...

Is that possible in dagger?

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

> 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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

Check out https://dagger.io/. Write declarative pipelines in code, reproducibly run anywhere.

Is this similar to Dagger[1] ?

[1] https://dagger.io