shykes

Workspace design briefing: implementation vs. design discussion

Workspace Design Briefing: Implementation vs. Discussion

Companion to the ongoing Discord design thread. Based on a review of the implementation on the workspace branch against the points raised in discussion.

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1. "Every client always has a workspace"

shykes

Part 3: Artifacts

Builds on Part 1: Module vs. Workspace and Part 2: Workspace API

Table of Contents

• Problem
• Solution
• What is an Artifact
• Operations

shykes

Dagger Design: Part 2 - Workspace API

Builds on Part 1: Workspaces and Modules

Table of Contents

• Problem
• Solution
• The Workspace Type
• Injection

shykes

Dagger Design: Part 1 - Workspaces and Modules

Dagger Design: Part 1 - Workspaces and Modules

This proposal is part 1 of an multi-part proposal to simplify the "design knot" - an interconnected set of design and ux problems blocking implementation of a wide range of features and improvements

Table of Contents

• Problem
• Core Concepts

shykes

CI/CD Stack (Dagger Cloud)

flowchart TB
    API[GitHub API]
    DaggerCloud[Dagger Cloud]
    Dev[Developer Machine]
    DaggerLocal[Dagger Engine]
    Pipeline[Portable Pipeline Logic]

shykes

CI/CD Stack

flowchart TB
    API[GitHub API]
    CP[GitHub Actions Control Plane]
    Runner[GitHub Actions Runner]
    Compute[Compute Provider]
    Dev[Developer Machine]
 DaggerLocal[Dagger Engine]

shykes

Dagger Weekly Brief: Discord + GitHub Beat

Week of Jan 22-29, 2026

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Table of Contents

1. TL;DR
2. Customers

• NowBookIt

shykes

Dagger Parallel Execution - Full Design Conversation

User

Help me plan a new "collaborative parallel execution" feature in dagger. The general idea:

• Dagger functions can be annotated with a new directive @parallel (+parallel in Go etc) which indicates to the engine that this function can be executed in parallel
• The dimensions of paralellism are controlled by arguments. Any argument to a parallel function that is a list, is interpreted by the engine as a dimension of parallelism. The contract is that when a client invokes a paralle function, the engine may split that "frontend" invocation into N "backend" invocations, with each invocation receiving a slice of the frontend list argument. The function implementor is responsible for guarranteeing correct behavior of the function regardless of the splitting.
• Only return types that can be reliably merged in any order (I don't know the fancy terminology) is allowed. Example: Directory is allowed because you can always merge N directories together. Chan

shykes

Collaborative Parallel Execution in Dagger

Summary

This document explores design options for a new parallel execution feature in Dagger, enabling functions to be automatically split and executed across multiple workers.

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Problem Statement

shykes

registryURL: string

runRegistry: docker.#Run & {
        args: ["registry", "-h", registryURL] // bla bla
        // Wait for registry port to be available
        hooks: post: waitRegistry: {
                args: """
                        while true; do
                                curl -L -S "localhost:foo" && exit
                                sleep 1