i want to move away from GitHub Actions and I also want to move away from some bespoke monorepo tooling for something that's a better overall orchestrator of 'things'. Dagger scratches some of those itches, or seems to, so I've had my eye on it for a while. Knowing that they're trying to also help me define and use containerized environments - I sort of assumed I'd have to bring those myself.
I'm using Dagger in a monorepo setup (actually several). For the main one, I've gone the route of wrapping the Dagger Go SDK with a custom Go CLI (plus CUE as another centerpiece). For sure, I've been making the team aware of the challenges and rough edges. (of course there are a lot of ways people organize monorepos, we are polyglot with one go.mod but multiple package.json...)
I'm largely replacing Dockerfiles and Makefiles with a custom CLI that wraps Dagger. Being able to use a proper language, functions, packages, imports is so much better by comparison. (ymmv)
Dagger looks nifty, but it's too bad that it's still basically an imperative "start from thing, do stuff to it, publish" kind of model, rather than just expressing a desired end state and letting an underlying engine find its way there.
Dagger is fully declarative. It's just built on a dynamic declarative API, instead of a static declarative DSL.
So, if you took Nix, and replaced the static scheme-like DSL with a proper API, and then built SDKs in 5 languages for that API; and then built a bash-like shell also for easy scripting; then you would start to have something that approximates Dagger.
Thanks for giving it another chance! We need to get better at explaining all this, it's a lot to unpack, although prior experience with declarative systems like Nix or Bazel does help a lot :)
We have a very active discord, feel free to come by and ask all the tough questions!
Also what would you prefer to see instead of bash compatible?