Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Earthly
Build anything via containers
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Earthly launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Super simple build framework with fast, repeatable builds and an instantly familiar syntax – like Dockerfile and Makefile had a baby. - earthly/earthly
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Turn your AGENTS.md, engineering standards, and process docs into deterministic enforcement in AI authoring loops and on PRs — in minutes, not quarters.
2021 · earthly.dev · its alternatives →
- 3
Docker configuration for building Linux From Scratch system - reinterpretcat/lfs
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Keystone▲125We kept hitting the same wall: you clone some arbitrary repo and just want it to run without any configuration work. So we built Keystone, an open source tool that spins up a Modal sandbox, runs Claude Code inside it, and produces a working .devcontainer/ config (Dockerfile, devcontainer.json, test runner) for any git repo. We build on the dev container standard, so the output works with VS Code and GitHub Codespaces out of the box. Main use cases: reproducible dev/CI environments, self-describing repos, and safely sandboxed coding agents. Our goal is to encourage all repos to…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells and containers. You start by defining the list of packages required by your development environment, and devbox uses that definition to create an isolated environment just for your application. In practice, Devbox works similar to a package manager like yarn – except the packages it manages are at the operating-system level (the sort of thing you would normally install with brew or apt-get). See it in action: https://youtu.be/WMBaXQZmDoA
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6DC
I've been frustrated with dependency hell and clutter on my VPS from dev, so I built Devbox: a lightweight, open-source CLI tool that spins up isolated development environments using Docker. Each project runs in its own container, but your code stays in simple flat folders on the host machine—no messing with volumes or sync issues. Environments are disposable, so you can nuke and recreate them without losing your work. Key features: - Instant setup: `devbox init my-project` and you're in a fresh env with `devbox shell`. - Configurable via JSON: Define packages, services, and more in a…
2025 · devbox.ar0.eu · its alternatives →
- 7HM
A developer's machine accumulates tools fast. A Rust CLI you compiled last year, a Python formatter installed via `uv`, a language server pulled from npm, a terminal emulator from a curl script, a Go binary built from source. Each came from a different package manager, each with its own install incantation you half-remember. I wanted a way to declare what I need without adopting a complex system like Nix or Ansible just for a single laptop. The result was a plain old Makefile. I wrote a short post on using Make (along with a tiny bash script and fzf) to create a searchable, single-command…
Mar 2026 · thottingal.in · its alternatives →
- 8
Support for bootable OS containers (bootc) and generating disk images - podman-desktop/extension-bootc
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
zero▲94One command to deploy Docker containers to your own server
Apr 2026 · shipzero.sh · its alternatives →
- 10
This project addresses the inefficiencies of traditional Dockerfile-based container builds where each customization layer creates storage bloat through duplicate dependencies from repeated apt-get install commands, network inefficiency from redundant package downloads across different images, and slow iteration cycles requiring full rebuilds of all previous steps. Our solution enables building minimal base images from scratch using debootstrap that precisely include only required components in the initial build, while allowing creation of specialized variants (Java, Kafka, etc.) from these…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hi HN, I've been building Nucleus, a lightweight Linux container runtime focused on two workloads: ephemeral AI-agent sandboxes and declarative NixOS services. It's a single Rust binary, no daemon. It is not a Docker replacement and not a strict subset of Docker either. I dropped the entire image-and-distribution half (no Dockerfile, no layers, no registry, no pull/push, no persistent storage layer) in exchange for going deeper on isolation and reproducibility. The rootfs is either a directory copied into tmpfs (agent mode) or a Nix-built closure mounted read-only (production mode). If…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Hello! This is Edgar and Robbie and we built nix-snapshotter. nix-snapshotter brings native understanding of Nix packages to containerd. We built this because Nix is a great fit for making efficient containers. They don't need an OS because Nix captures all dependencies exactly. However, the current process of creating Nix images is subpar because one needs to transform Nix packages into a format that container runtimes understand. Using nix-snapshotter, instead of downloading image layers, packages come directly from the Nix store. Packages can be fetched from a binary cache or built on the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13AD
Hello HN! We just launched a new feature we built at Depot that accelerates Docker image builds on your local machine in a team environment, and we wanted to share some of the details with you all. The launch blog post: https://depot.dev/blog/local-builds Depot is a hosted container build service - we run fully managed Intel and Arm remote build machines in AWS, with large instance sizes and SSD cache disks. The machines run BuildKit, the build engine that powers Docker, so generally anything you can `docker build`, you can also `depot build`. Most people use Depot in CI,…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 14
Docker based portable Workstation. Contribute to mikadosoftware/workstation development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Develop and run your Python applications in clean Docker environments - macostea/cage
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN - We've been working on Coasts (“containerized hosts”) to make it so you can run multiple localhost instances, and multiple docker-compose runtimes, across git worktrees on the same computer. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRiySdGQZZA. There are also videos in our docs that give a good conceptual overview: https://coasts.dev/docs/learn-coasts-videos. Agents can make code changes in different worktrees in isolation, but it's hard for them to test their changes without multiple localhost runtimes that are isolated and scoped to those…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Create with AI or code, deploy instantly on production infrastructure. One platform to build and ship.
2015 · netlify.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Build native RPM packages for Centos/RHEL/Fedora from any Linux distro or even OSX, by leveraging docker capabilities. - docker-rpm-builder/docker-rpm-builder
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19LD
Hey HN, I’m excited to show you Layerfiles, an OSS project which gives you a single binary to build microvms using a syntax that looks like a Dockerfile. The project is currently in alpha, but it’s already able to build a VM on Linux hosts. MicroVMs are like containers, but have several upsides: - They can run on any OS, so you don’t need to run a wrapper VM like Docker Desktop does. - They also let you keep processes running during a build (RUN BACKGROUND), so you can run a webserver or build server in the background. - You can generally run them rootless without any extra configuration.…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 20
A proof-of-concept project that makes accessible buildkitd daemon from macOS - developer-guy/buildkit-machine
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi hackers! I'm a self-taught solo teenage dev working on Seastar, a unified build system and dependency manager for C and C++. It is capable of compiling and linking projects, managing recursive dependencies and headers, and even has a template system -- your C++ library is one `seastar new mylib --lang c++ --lib` away! Also, everything is configured in TOML, because TOML is awesome. C is one of my favorite languages, but I usually end up writing stuff in Rust because I love Cargo. Unlike C, Cargo handles the dependencies, linking, globbing, and so much more for you. So I wrote Seastar to…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Build, deploy and manage your applications on any cloud or your own servers.
2015 · blog.cloud66.com · its alternatives →
- 23
build is like Makefile for single files. Contribute to hbbio/build development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Buildfiles: Ansible automated leight-weight and sensible Debian provisioning - cytopia/ansible-debian
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Earthly – Build automation for the container era alternatives
- Earthly – Better Builds alternatives
- Build your Linux from Scratch inside Docker with one command alternatives
- Keystone alternatives
- Devbox – Easy, predictable shells and containers alternatives
- Devbox – Containers for better dev environments alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →