Quickstart
In this quickstart, you'll fork an example project, add automated checks, and open a pull request that runs those checks in Dagger Cloud — no CI YAML required.
Requirements
- Dagger CLI installed
- Git and a container runtime (Docker, Podman, or similar)
- A GitHub account
- Optional: GitHub CLI for the copy-paste fork and pull request commands
Fork the example project
Fork the example project into your GitHub account or organization, then clone your fork.
With GitHub CLI:
gh repo fork dagger/hello-dagger --clone --default-branch-only
cd hello-dagger
For an organization fork, add --org YOUR_GITHUB_ORG to the gh repo fork command.
If you use the GitHub web UI instead, clone your fork locally before continuing. Dagger uses the repository's origin remote to infer which GitHub repository should run checks, so make sure origin points to your fork.
Create a branch
git checkout -b add-dagger-checks
Setup your workspace
dagger setup walks through a few prompts: logging in to Dagger Cloud, migrating any legacy configuration (not needed here), and installing recommended modules based on a scan of your project.
dagger setup
Log in to Dagger Cloud when prompted — you'll use it later to enable automatic checks — and select Install to install the recommended modules.
This creates a dagger.toml configuration file and adds three modules: a linter, a test runner, and a code formatter.
Run checks
dagger check
All three modules run their checks concurrently. Some checks pass, but prettier:check fails — the example project has some unformatted files, so dagger check exits non-zero.
Fix the formatting
Let Prettier rewrite the files for you:
dagger api call prettier write
This returns a changeset — the reformatted files — and offers to apply it to your working tree; confirm to apply it. Run the checks again:
dagger check
This time every check passes.
Commit and push
git add .
git commit -m "Add Dagger checks"
git push -u origin add-dagger-checks
Enable automatic checks
Dagger can infer the GitHub repository from your local checkout:
dagger workspace remote
Enable automatic checks for that repository:
dagger cloud check on
If you are not signed in to Dagger Cloud yet, the command guides you through signup or login. If the GitHub integration is not installed yet, the command guides you through authorizing GitHub and selecting the forked repository.
Open a pull request
With GitHub CLI:
GITHUB_OWNER=YOUR_GITHUB_USER_OR_ORG
gh pr create \
--repo "$GITHUB_OWNER/hello-dagger" \
--base main \
--head add-dagger-checks \
--title "Add Dagger checks" \
--body "Run Dagger checks on every pull request."
If you use the GitHub web UI instead, open a pull request from add-dagger-checks into main in your fork. Do not open the pull request against the upstream dagger/hello-dagger repository.
Verify CI
Your pull request should show Dagger check statuses. You can also inspect recent Dagger Cloud activity from the CLI:
dagger activity
Next steps
Now do it on your own project — see Workspace Setup.