August 2023 Summaries

Dagger is being used by Tony Worm, the developer of Hof, an open source code generation framework, to improve the consistency and accuracy of Hof's test suite. Initially, Tony relied on the Go `testscript` package to test Hof's features, but this approach was imperfect due to path calculations issues in mock environments. With Dagger, Tony has created a containerized home environment for testing Hof's features, which runs each test in a "real" home environment and eliminates stale states or conflicts caused by previous tests. The use of Dagger has also enabled the team to adopt a matrix test pattern and execute the test suite against different versions of Go. Tony plans to explore using Dagger in multiple ways, including shipping a pipeline with Hof, complementing GoReleaser, and integrating Dagger with GitHub Actions for automated build, testing, and publishing of documentation.

Discern, a company that uses a highly sophisticated and optimized CI/CD system powered by the open-source tool Dagger, has seen significant benefits from adopting Dagger. The system automatically builds and ships a full ephemeral copy of the application on every pull request, enabling developers to build and test multiple features or versions of the application simultaneously yet independently. Approved builds can be deployed almost instantaneously to production through the same pipeline. By using Dagger's Go SDK and experimental caching feature, Discern has reduced its build times from 15 minutes to just 2 minutes, resulting in faster deployment to production. The company also benefits from native tooling with rapid and seamless production deployment, allowing for more sophisticated testing and eliminating issues caused by stale data. With Dagger, Discern has gained the ability to build, test, and ship software in a highly scalable manner from day one, saving thousands of engineering hours and enabling easy evolution and improvement of their pipeline over the next five years.

Dagger 0.8 introduces several breaking changes to its API, including the removal of the `Container.exitCode` field, which must now be retrieved with `ExecError` in the SDKs. This change affects how command execution status is checked and handled. Additionally, the `Host.envVariable` field is no longer supported, and other deprecated fields such as `Container.exec`, `Container.fs`, `Container.withFS`, and `Host.workdir` are removed or replaced with new alternatives. The Python SDK now requires the use of keyword arguments when they're optional, and the synchronous client has been removed in favor of an asynchronous client. These changes aim to improve readability, consistency, and performance with Dagger. As usual, it's recommended to consult the release notes and update instructions for a complete list of changes and updates.