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Comment by shykes | Hacker News Reader

I apologize in advance for the plug. I've spent the last 5 years warning of the importance of not leaving CI locked in a black box platform and proprietary DSL. All the while going on a quest to reinvent CI as an open, programmable platform. Honestly it's still a work-in-progress: it turns out that reinvention is hard! But, if you want a glimpse of what CI can be when you shed 30 years of legacy, consider checking out Dagger (https://dagger.io).

Or, if you just want to talk about the future of CI with like-minded systems engineers, without committing to using a particular product, consider joining our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/dagger-io

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A while ago I checked this out and the homepage looked like it had fallen to the 'AI hype' trend, you know like how everything was 'AI-native XYZ for Autonomous Agents' at the time. I'm not seeing that now though.

Am I thinking of someone else or did you reverse on that?

Yes, that was us. And yes, we reversed on that. The feedback from our community was quite clear :)

I ALMOST chose dagger, but the idea of writing code to build my code felt like maintaining two applications. While I didn't chose it, the idea that new paradigms are needed was the draw.

Yes, it can be a double-edged sword. One reason I called Dagger a "work in progress" is that we took it too far. It's one thing that you can write custom code for your pipeline; it's another that you must write custom code.

We are actively overhauling our design (in a backwards compatible way) to reach a better balance. The result is that, for most users, writing custom code will not be required to use Dagger. But it will be available for power users who want to extend and customize the platform. Writing code for Dagger will be less like using a frameworok, and more like writing a plugin for a devops tool.

If you're interested, you can track our progress in our combined changelog / roadmap page: https://dagger.io/changelog/#modules-v2 . The overhaul project is called "modules v2".

Perhaps once it ships, you can give Dagger another try :)

Wow I've been struggling with deployment/CI on Claude/Codex/devcontainers for the last several weeks and this looks amazing. I'm trying to find a "universal" way to deploy on multiple cloud and baremetal platforms.

Looks cool. Can it be self hosted? I.e. can I self host it next to my self hosted forgejo instance?

Yes, the Dagger engine is open source. Note that the engine on its own is not a CI replacement: it provides a runtime for your pipelines, but you still need an external system to trigger pipelines from git events. This decoupling is intentional, because CI should not be tightly coupled to git events. Sometimes you want to run a pipeline after pushing; but sometimes you need it before pushing, or even before committing. The pipeline runtime therefore should operate at a different layer than git events.

In practice this means you can combine Dagger with, say, Github Actions or another "legacy" CI platform. And use it as runner & event infrastructure for your portable Dagger pipelines.

We also offer a complete Dagger-native CI platform, which combines hosted Dagger engines, git triggers, and all the infrastructure necessary to run your CI end-to-end. That is in early access as part of Dagger Cloud, our commercial offering.

Well, I'm sold! Trying out your offering this weekend :)

No apology necessary - I appreciate the straightforward offer of solutions to difficult problems.

Are you hiring? This sounds like a really cool space and product to work on.

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