WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 46262832

(no title)

usrme | 2 months ago

Dagger was something I looked into two or so years ago before they got consumed by the LLM and AI agent hype, and while the promise of being able to run the exact CI workflows locally seemed excellent, it seemed that there's basically no way be a Dagger user without buying into their Dagger Cloud product.

I ended up opting for CUE and GitHub Actions, and I'm glad I did as it made everything much, much simpler.

discuss

order

tom1337|2 months ago

Same - we began the migration to Dagger but then switched to just Docker-In-Docker and custom scripts which run vendor-agnostic

digdugdirk|2 months ago

Can you explain/link to why you can't really use this without their cloud product? I'm not seeing anything at a glance, and this looks useful for a project of mine, but I don't want to be trapped by limitations that I only find out about after putting in weeks of work

themgt|2 months ago

Overall I like Dagger conceptually, but I wish they'd start focusing more on API stability and documentation (tbf it's not v1.0). v0.19 broke our Dockerfile builds and I don't feel like figuring out the new syntax atm. Having to commit dev time to the upgrade treadmill to keep CI/CD working was not the dream.

re: the cloud specifically see these GitHub issues:

https://github.com/dagger/dagger/issues/6486

https://github.com/dagger/dagger/issues/8004

Basically if you want consistently fast cached builds it's a PITA and/or not possible without the cloud product, depending on how you set things up. We do run it self-hosted though, YMMV.

shykes|2 months ago

Hi, I'm the founder of Dagger. It's not true that you can't use Dagger without our cloud offering. At the moment our only commercial product is observability for your Dagger pipelines. It's based on standard otel telemetry emitted by our open source engine. It's completely optional.

If you have questions about Dagger, I encourage you to join our Discord server, we will be happy to answer them!

esafak|2 months ago

dagger was originally CUE-based, but there was not enough demand so it was dropped. https://dagger.io/blog/ending-cue-support

pxc|2 months ago

> If you’ve been active in the Dagger community, this news will come as no surprise. Since we released multi-language support, we have seen a steep decline in usage of our original CUE configuration syntax, and have made it clear that feature parity with newer SDKs would not be a priority.

That is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy (or, perhaps, a self-inflicted wound). As soon as Dagger's "multi-language support" came out (actually a bit before), the CUE SDK was rendered abandonware. Development only happened on the new backend, and CUE support was never ported over to the new one.

flanked-evergl|2 months ago

What I don't get is why would someone code in the terrible GitHub actions dsl which only runs on GitHub actions and nowhere else when there are so many other options that run perfectly fine if you just run it from GitHub actions.

Kinrany|2 months ago

Same: the promise of defining CI/CD in code is good, but the implementation didn't make sense to me even before the LLM stuff

Xiol|2 months ago

Do you have any more details on using Cue with GHA? I've also looked at Dagger and been quite disappointed with it (and their terrible documentation).

usrme|2 months ago

When I got started it was much more difficult as you had to do a lot of manual work to get things started, and you really had to believe the promises that CUE offered (which I did...), but nowadays they've made so many steps in the right direction that getting something going is far quicker!

Here are a few links to whet your appetite:

- https://cue.dev/docs/getting-started-with-github-actions-cue...

- https://cue.dev/docs/drying-up-github-actions-workflows/

- https://cue.dev/docs/spotting-errors-earlier-github-actions-...

Definitely read through the CUE documentation (https://cuelang.org/docs/), watch their YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/@cuelang/videos), and join the community Slack channel (https://cuelang.org/community/). I've gotten a lot of help in the Slack from both enthusiastic community members and from the developers themselves whenever I've gotten stuck.