Earthly

What is Earthly?

Earthly is an open-source build automation tool that sits between your Dockerfile and your CI/CD pipeline. It solves the classic problem of "works on my machine" by making builds containerized and reproducible by design — the same build command produces identical results on a MacBook, a Linux workstation, and GitHub Actions.

Key Features

Earthfiles — Build scripts written in a syntax inspired by Dockerfiles and Makefiles. Earthfiles are easy to read and understand, combining the best of both without the limitations of either.

Containerized Builds — Every build step runs in a container. This guarantees that builds don't depend on local system configuration, installed tools, or environment variables — only what's explicitly defined.

Automatic Caching — Earthly automatically caches build artifacts and Docker layers. Changed files only trigger the steps that depend on them. Earthly Cloud provides remote caching shared across the whole team.

CI Agnostic — Earthly runs unchanged on GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, or locally. Migrate CI systems without rewriting build scripts.

Parallel Targets — Build, test, and publish steps that don't depend on each other run in parallel automatically, without manual configuration.

Why Teams Choose Earthly

The core appeal is eliminating "it works in CI but not locally" and "it works locally but not in CI" — the two most frustrating phrases in software development. With 10,000+ GitHub stars, Earthly has strong community adoption among teams who have suffered with inconsistent build environments.

Pricing

• Earthly CLI: Free and open-source (Apache 2.0)
• Earthly Cloud: Remote caching and CI/CD integration (~$50/month for small teams)
• Earthly Satellites: Managed remote runners

Bottom Line

Earthly is the right tool when your CI builds frequently diverge from local builds and debugging CI failures requires pushing commits to see results. It's a powerful complement to any CI platform.