Company
Date Published
Author
Evan Pease
Word count
3241
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The article examines the integration of Earthly with GitHub Actions for CI/CD processes, focusing on Earthly's capabilities for producing consistent, repeatable builds and its compatibility with monorepos. It provides a comparative analysis of build consistency, simplicity, and execution speed between Earthly and GitHub Actions, highlighting Earthly's advantage in allowing local execution of CI pipelines, which enhances iteration speed and reduces the risk of introducing errors. The piece details the challenges of using GitHub Actions, such as the complexity of YAML configurations and caching inconsistencies, while illustrating how Earthly simplifies these tasks with its Earthfile system and layer-based caching. The author conducts an experiment with a polyglot monorepo project to test both systems, concluding that Earthly offers a more efficient and elegant solution for CI, especially for complex projects. Additionally, it suggests a hybrid approach using Earthly with GitHub Actions to optimize performance and reduce the complexity of YAML workflows.