Hello HN. Earthly is a tool for build automation. I like to think of our solution as a modern version of a makefile. Many people are familiar with makefiles, a

Hello HN. Earthly is a tool for build automation. I like to think of our solution as a modern version of a makefile. Many people are familiar with makefiles, and back before every CI server was configured using YAML and groovy, this was a common way to build things. We are trying to improve the simplicity of make by adding on the repeatability of docker containers. By mixing those two concepts together, a lot of cool properties fall out. Because each target is containerized, there is no works-on-my-machine issues, or tests failing because something is not installed on one Jenkins runner or so on. Second, that isolation means that dependencies between steps need to be explicitly declared, and with this knowledge, earthly can infer parallelism. Third, containerization gives caching abilities. We can tell if nothing’s changed since a previous run, and earthly can cache steps across build runs or even across machines. You get to use a docker registry as a build cache. We shared this on here about a year ago[1], and since that, lots has changed. First of all, a year ago it was just Vlad working on this, and now there is a number of us, including me. But for end-users, we have shipped many great features such as multi-arch builds, docker-compose support (which is handy for running integration tests ), inline and explicit caching, and an interactive debug mode. Interactive debug mode is neat but straightforward: a failing build step pops you into a shell at the point of failure. Let me know what you think of what we have built. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22890612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22890612