Thoughts
I don't know what to tell you. I don't want to say that EarthBuild is garbage, but. I'm 6 hours in and I just built my project with it. The
build process for my project is `zine release`. They have so much documentation and it's so unhelpful somehow. At least I finally made it to the part where I can run the builder.
You can't have underscores in target names and if you do they just say "Error: invalid target". Like com'on.
I would PR but it's Go and I do not know Go.
Flags have to be provided before the target name.
It's really slow. Even before validating the Earthfile it queries docker for a bunch of info, and since I'm using a remote builder it's like 10ms round-trip time and it's doing many queries so it adds up, only to tell me my target doesn't exist because I forgot the + in front of it.
Earthly uses a `.secret` file by default, act uses a `.secrets` file by default.
COPY copies the contents of a directory, which I gather is what Docker does and there's an option to not do that, but it's confusing that it's not just the same as `cp`.
The reason I'm interesting in Earth is because it promises to be faster, right. Let's see how it compares (this is "build+deploy" with no changes, though it doesn't matter since Zine rebuilding takes like 20ms):
* GitHub Actions: 39s
* act (remote docker host): 130.79s
* EarthBuild (remote buildkit): 5.9s
* Running `rm -rf public && ./bin/zine release && wrangler deploy --assets=public --name=zig-guide --compatibility-date=2025-07-20`: 11.946s
For reference, the actual work being done breaks down as around <100ms from building, and ~10 second from wrangler re-deploying (was getting 7s yesterday but over 10 today). EarthBuild is the only one smart enough to know it can skip that 10s completely because the files haven't changed. But it adds 6 seconds of BS. So it would be ~6s slower than a bash script if the files had changed.