Our team has had great success with GitHub Actions and Environments for CI/CD. One nice thing going that route is the build related code is contained within repositories. A large number of developers are already familiar wit GitHub, which makes onboarding new team members easier. I don’t see anything too compelling with dagger.io that is missing with GitHub. You can even use ACT to test workflow changes to builds locally.
I'm in the same boat, but I do think there's a prospect of Dagger being a superior option in the long term, if...
1. They invest in building out their catalog of actions to compete with GitHub's. I maintain a few GitHub Actions and despite the GitHub catalog's depth, it's still lacking in many ways and GitHub don't appear to invest in it too much: a "maintainer fund" and creative poaching from Dagger could rapidly bring them up to par. A few million of their raise, well deployed, could crush GitHub's catalog.
2. They invest in tight integrations with platforms. GitHub Actions is great because of composability, yes, but also the deep integration with GitHub itself. Being able to run Dagger on GitHub Actions is one thing, but being able to leverage deployment environments cross-platform would be another.
3. GitHub Actions is great, I am a fan of it, I'll speak highly of it often, but the codebase... it is bad. If Dagger can build out a platform that competes with GitHub Actions on functionality, and it has a pleasant codebase, they'll make huge gains from community participation. Contributing to GitHub Actions is painful.
So, I agree with you today, but a year from now, I could see a very different situation and I am optimistic.
How well does act work nowadays in practice? I was automating multiple PHP, Ansible, and Nodejs related projects last year and act failed (can't remember the exact errors now) for each project at some step.
My experience trying to get vscodium to build using act was similarly "oh no," which I think is a cat-and-mouse pitfall that's found in every emulator
The patch I made to act was bigger than I thought the act project would accept, so I just worked around it with some well placed docker volumes and running GH actions "by hand"
