Announcing Earthly v0.7

This post was originally published on Earthly's blog. It was part of a coordinated launch for Earthly CI that included the blog posts 'Earthly CI: Launching a new era for CI', 'Announcing Earthly’s $6.5M Seed+ round', and 'Remote Code Execution as a Service as well as a press release, a blog post by Innovation Endeavors, Earthly lead investors in the announced funding round, and coverage by TechCrunch.

Today, we're announcing the release of Earthly v0.7. The new version introduces changes that make Earthly work with Earthly CI, our new CI/CD platform (read more about it in Earthly CI: Launching a new era for CI), in addition to promoting several features from Experimental or Beta to GA – notably Podman support and the WAIT command.

We do not take major or minor releases lightly at Earthly. We've never had a major release, and our last minor release was over a year ago, in December 2021 (read about it in Announcing Earthly v0.6). That's because we know that the reliability and stability of your build and CI/CD processes are of the utmost importance. In every minor release of Earthly (and also eventually when we have a major release), all features promoted to GA have finalized APIs and have been through thorough testing. That's why we are comfortable enabling all features promoted to GA by default.

Compatibility With Earthly CI

Earthly 0.7 is the first version compatible with Earthly CI. All Earthly CI pipelines are defined in Earthfiles using Earthly's simple, familiar syntax and stored in the project's repository.

Earthly 0.7 introduces the new keywords PIPELINE and TRIGGER to define Earthly CI pipelines. You can execute pipelines on your computer in the exact same way you execute build targets. So it's super simple to iterate on and test CI pipelines on your computer before you push them to prod.

The following example defines a CI pipeline named build-pipeline that executes the +my-service target and is triggered whenever there is a pull request raised against the main branch of the repository:

build-pipeline:
    PIPELINE
    TRIGGER pr main
    BUILD +my-service

my-service:
    BUILD +image
    BUILD +unit-test
    BUILD +integration-test

image:
    FROM alpine:3.17
    COPY +src/my-service /bin
    ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/my-service"]
    ARG VERSION=latest
    SAVE IMAGE --push acmecorp/my-service:$VERSION

unit-test:
    FROM +src
    COPY main_test.go ./
    RUN go test ./...

integration-test:
    FROM +src
    COPY main_integration_test.go .
    COPY docker-compose.yml ./
    WITH DOCKER --compose docker-compose.yml
        RUN go test --tags=integration ./...
    END

src:
    COPY go.mod go.sum ./
    RUN go mod download
    COPY main.go ./
    RUN go build -o my-service main.go
    SAVE ARTIFACT my-service AS LOCAL my-service

For more information on using the PIPELINE and TRIGGER commands, see our docs.

Podman Support

Podman is an alternative to Docker. It is an open source tool for developing, managing, and running containers on Linux systems. Podman also works on Mac systems using podman machine and Windows systems using WSLv2 and podman machine. Podman is daemonless, which has some advantages over Docker's approach.

Earthly has supported Podman for a while now, but, with Earthly 0.7, Podman support is being promoted out of beta status and is generally available. Earthly will automatically detect the container frontend, whether Docker or Podman, and use it automatically, both for running Buildkit locally and outputting built images locally.

For more information on using Podman with Earthly, see our docs.

WAIT Command

Breaking Change: The behavior of --push mode has changed in a backwards incompatible manner.

Pushing no longer requires everything else to succeed. Previously, --push commands would only execute if all other commands had succeeded. This requirement is no longer enforced. This allows for more flexible push ordering using the new WAIT command. To achieve the behavior of the previous --push mode, you need to wrap any pre-required commands in a WAIT/END block.

Example: Push an Image Only if Tests Have Passed

test-and-push:
  WAIT
    BUILD +test
  END
  BUILD +my-image
my-image:
  ...
  SAVE IMAGE --push my-org/my-image:latest

Example: Push an Image and Deploy Using the Newly Pushed Image

Where ./deploy.sh is a custom deployment script instructing a production environment to start using the image that was just pushed.

push-and-deploy:
  ...
  WAIT
    BUILD +my-image
  END
  RUN --push ./deploy.sh my-org/my-image:latest
my-image:
  ...
  SAVE IMAGE --push my-org/my-image:latest

For more information on using the WAIT command, see our docs.

VERSION Is Now Mandatory

Breaking Change: The VERSION command is now required for all Earthfiles, and an error will occur if it is missing.

If you are not ready to update your Earthfiles to use 0.7 (or 0.6), you can declare VERSION 0.5 to continue to use your Earthfiles.

All Features Promoted to GA in 0.7

For more information on the individual Earthfile feature flags see the Earthfile version-specific features page.

For more detailed information on Earthly 0.7, read the Earthly 0.7 release notes.

Thank You to the Earthly Community

Huge thank you to the Earthly community! From the 8.7K+ developers that have starred us on GitHub to our 800+ member community Slack (click to join), you all have played an instrumental role in the development of Earthly 0.7. Your code contributions, feature requests, and feedback made this release possible. We are so grateful to have such a dedicated and supportive community of developers from all over the world that believe in Earthly and want to make builds better.

Get Earthly Today

Make your CI/CD super simple. Get Earthly. Earthly is a versatile, approachable CI/CD framework that gives you repeatable builds that you write once and run anywhere; has a simple, instantly recognizable syntax – like Dockerfile and Makefile had a baby; and works with every language, framework, and build tool.