I love earthly! It has been a joy to use.
One thing I haven’t gotten right is caching. Some of my builds have targets they depend on that are very expensive but rarely change, and I haven’t been able to make sense of when those targets are (re)computed and when they aren’t. This results in many builds taking a long time, when the targets could be reused from a cache.
Earthly is also missing something that I find to be a glaring omission from make—give me a command to simply list the targets in an Earthfile. ‘earthly ls’? Maybe have a column or two that indicates whether the target saves an image or artifact. When building a project I didn’t author, it’d be so helpful for the targets to be discoverable.
The `earthly ls` idea is great. We do have shell autocompletions but that is not quite the same thing. I will add a ticket for that.
Cache misses can be a bit inscrutable. It could be the buildkit GC is running, because disk space is getting scarce, or that some arg or file change caused the cache to be considered invalid.
Caching is an area we will continue to improve. We have a proposal for extended cache mounts here[1].
Thanks for using earthly!