Dagger Documentation

What is Dagger?

Dagger is a CI orchestration engine. Define your pipelines once, in real code. Run them identically before and after push, locally or at scale.

Orientation

• Want to adopt Dagger in your project? Start with the Quickstart, then follow Workspace Setup.
• Your project already uses Dagger? See Using Dagger to run checks, generate code, and start services.
• Migrating to workspaces? See Upgrading to Workspaces.
• Want to learn more about what Dagger can do? Keep reading.

What you can do

No code required. Install modules, run commands, get results.

Lint and format across your stack

dagger mod install github.com/dagger/eslint
dagger mod install github.com/dagger/prettier
dagger check

Run e2e tests with real services

dagger mod install github.com/dagger/playwright
dagger check

Run code generators

dagger mod install github.com/dagger/go
dagger generate

Debug a broken build

dagger check
dagger call eslint lint terminal

Key features

Programmable. Real code — Go, Python, TypeScript — not YAML.

Local-first. Run your full pipeline before you push. Same result everywhere.

Zero-setup tracing. Every step traced automatically. No instrumentation code.

Interactive debugging. Drop into a terminal at any step of your pipeline.

Incremental execution. Only what changed gets re-executed.

Agent-friendly. Agents run Dagger checks in their dev loop. Sandboxed, cached, remote.

Native secrets. Plugs into your existing secret infrastructure.

Just-in-time services. Service dependencies build on demand, no pre-provisioning.