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Comment by shykes | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I believe that is a fair comparison. Earhly is more focused on builds, whereas Dagger has a wider scope: build, test, deployment, any part of a CI/CD pipeline really. But the overall philosophy is the same: run everything in containers. The choice of buildkit as a runtime is also a key similarity. One big difference is that we use CUE as a configuration language, and Earthly uses YAML.

We have a lot of respect (and common friends!) with the Earthly developers, I am confident we can help each other build even better tools, and grow the buildkit ecosystem in the process.

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Another *monster* difference is that Dagger is (at least currently) Apache 2: https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/v0.2.4/LICENSE but Earthly went with BSL: https://github.com/earthly/earthly/blob/v0.6.12/LICENSE

That means I'm more likely to submit bugs and patches to Dagger, and I won't touch Earthly

I can't speak to Earthly's choice of license (and am not familiar with BSL). But can confirm that we have no intention of changing licenses, and if we did, it would be for another OSI-approved license.

Our monetization model follows the same fundamentals as Red Hat before us: open code, strictly enforced trademark rules. "You can modify, use and redistribute the code at will. If you distribute a modified version, please call it something else."

I recently converted my company's build process to Earthly. I find its syntax to be much easier to grok than CUE. They've also extended/added Docker commands that shore up some of the pain points of working with Dockerfiles.

>Dagger has a wider scope: build, test, deployment, any part of a CI/CD pipeline really

I don't see any reason this can't go into an Earthfile. We have all of these parts in our Earthfiles.

The one common pain point that both Dagger and Earthly haven't solved for me is unifying the machine parallelization with the DAG parallelization. According to this comment[1], it seems like Dagger doesn't have that goal.

For example, we only run our +deploy target if +build, +test and +lint pass. We parallelize each of those targets across workers in Github Actions. I don't know what the solution is to this problem but I know this was annoying to have to handle with Github Action's workflow syntax and horrible to debug locally.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30859864

Earthly doesn’t use YAML but a syntax which is similar to Dockerfile with dashes of Makefile. I’m finding it extremely pleasant to write.

I stand corrected! Earthly developers if you read this, I'm sorry for misremembering. I would correct my original post if I could.

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?

Thanks for the info, that is wonderful to hear! Best of luck to both you and Earthly, much needed work you're doing!

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