runner VS dagger

In the case of GitHub Actions, it's made more painful by the lack of support for YAML anchors, which provide a bare minimum of composability.

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182

Even if you don’t pick Avalonia, their notes for Mac distribution look useful:

https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/distribution-publishing/mac...

For example, the GitHub actions runner itself is a modern .NET core project with CI except for .app packaging.

https://github.com/actions/runner/tree/main/.github/workflow...

This probably answers your question:

https://github.com/actions/runner/blob/a4c57f27477077e57545a...

$ mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner $ curl -o actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.311.0/actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 100 98.1M 100 98.1M 0 0 20.0M 0 0:00:04 0:00:04 --:--:-- 23.5M $ echo "fa2f107dbce709807bae014fb3121f5dbe106211b6bbe3484c41e3b30828d6b2 actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz" | shasum -a 256 -c actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz: OK $ tar xzf ./actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz ❯ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/dpills/devops-quick-start-guide --token AGDCRGCMZWN34QIVISIO5XXXXXX -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | | / ___(_) |_| | | |_ _| |__ / \ ___| |_(_) ___ _ __ ___ | | | | _| | __| |_| | | | | '_ \ / _ \ / __| __| |/ _ \| '_ \/ __| | | | |_| | | |_| _ | |_| | |_) | / ___ \ (__| |_| | (_) | | | \__ \ | | \____|_|\__|_| |_|\__,_|_.__/ /_/ \_\___|\__|_|\___/|_| |_|___/ | | | | Self-hosted runner registration | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Authentication √ Connected to GitHub # Runner Registration Enter the name of the runner group to add this runner to: [press Enter for Default] Enter the name of runner: [press Enter for dpills-mac] This runner will have the following labels: 'self-hosted', 'macOS', 'ARM64' Enter any additional labels (ex. label-1,label-2): [press Enter to skip] √ Runner successfully added √ Runner connection is good # Runner settings Enter name of work folder: [press Enter for _work] √ Settings Saved. ❯ ./run.sh √ Connected to GitHub Current runner version: '2.311.0' 2023-10-27 13:32:16Z: Listening for Jobs

A runner is where your action's jobs will be run. It can be a hosted virtual environment, or you can self-host a runner in your machine.

If i understand this writing correctly (https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/904), running Windows containers in a windows-latest GH Actions host is not possible. While using a self-hosted runner on a Windows server might be an option, this is not what I want since it is a package repo for a well-known open source project, think of the package repo part as a mini-Conan. I wouldn't know who would want to host that. In the best case we would stay with just GH Actions to keep everything confined in one space :)

Shameless plug for cuelang, which, among many other things, avoid this problem:

https://cuelang.org

It's not a new issue, the Python community had exactly the same surprise with 3.10: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1989

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

Hey, https://dagger.io employee here. We can help with this. I'd recommend taking a look at out Python SDK (https://docs.dagger.io/sdk/python) to build your pipelines and then leverage Dagger Cloud (https://dagger.io/blog/dagger-cloud) for fast production deployments.