Welder

One Tool to rule them all,
   one Tool to find them,
One Tool to bring them all
   and in the containers bind them

Documentation

Docs can be obtained at welder.simple-container.com.

Motivation

Welder is a CLI tool that allows running multi-module multi-SDK builds with the extensive use of Docker containers. The goal of Welder is to provide seamless build and deploy experience across environments, such as local and CI/CD.

It is focused on the build and deploy lifecycle of an application, trying to make the following operations easier:

• Build application using preferred SDK
• Build Docker images for the application
• Deploy application with the chosen deploy strategy

Dockerfile/Buildkit is good enough?

• Dockerfile allows to build a specific Docker image, while your application may need to produce many
• It is hard to provide secrets to the Docker build, even using Buildkit
• It is even harder to run integration tests from Docker build especially if they require Docker themselves

Docker Compose?

Docker Compose is not a generic run/build tool. While it can be used for similar purposes, it is hard to use it because it is geared towards describing an application and its dependencies and starting this whole stack.

Batect?

There are a few tools that work similar to Welder. For example Batect allows to define arbitrary containers and tasks that should be executed inside of them. While the proper comparision of Welder to Batect is still a TODO, the comparision of Batect to other tools provides some thoughts for motivation.

How to build

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Set-up Go build environment

Building

This project uses Mage as a build tool, so the main requirement is a Golang.

Using Golang:

# Install tools
cat tools.go | grep _ | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' | xargs -tI % go get %
# Run build
go run -mod=mod build.go build:all

Using Welder:

welder make