Dagger Has a Free API — Portable CI/CD Pipelines That Run Anywhere

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Dagger: Write CI/CD Pipelines in Your Language, Run Them Anywhere

Dagger lets you write CI/CD pipelines in Go, Python, or TypeScript — not YAML. Pipelines run identically on your laptop and in CI. No more "works in CI but not locally" debugging.

The Problem With YAML Pipelines

No type checking, no IDE support
Cannot run locally — must push to test
Vendor lock-in (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)
Complex logic in YAML = nightmare

The Free API

Python

import dagger
import anyio

async def main():
    async with dagger.Connection() as client:
        # Build
        src = client.host().directory(".")
        build = (
            client.container()
            .from_("python:3.12-slim")
            .with_directory("/app", src)
            .with_workdir("/app")
            .with_exec(["pip", "install", "-r", "requirements.txt"])
            .with_exec(["pytest", "tests/"])
        )
        # Run tests
        await build.stdout()

        # Publish image
        await (
            build
            .with_entrypoint(["python", "app.py"])
            .publish("registry.example.com/my-app:latest")
        )

anyio.run(main)

Go

func main() {
    ctx := context.Background()
    client, _ := dagger.Connect(ctx)
    defer client.Close()

    src := client.Host().Directory(".")

    // Build and test
    out, _ := client.Container().
        From("golang:1.22").
        WithDirectory("/src", src).
        WithWorkdir("/src").
        WithExec([]string{"go", "test", "./..."}).
        Stdout(ctx)

    fmt.Println(out)
}

Why Dagger

Feature	Dagger	GitHub Actions	Jenkins
Language	Go/Python/TS	YAML	Groovy/YAML
Run locally	Yes	No	No
Type safety	Yes	No	Partial
Vendor lock-in	None	GitHub	Jenkins
Caching	Built-in	Manual	Manual

Real-World Use Case

A team spent 2 hours daily debugging CI failures that could not be reproduced locally. After switching to Dagger, engineers run the exact same pipeline on their laptops. CI debugging time dropped to near zero.

Quick Start

curl -fsSL https://dl.dagger.io/dagger/install.sh | sh
dagger init --sdk=python
dagger call build --source=.

Resources

Need CI/CD data automation? Check out my tools on Apify or email spinov001@gmail.com for custom DevOps solutions.

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