Digger works best as a 2-piece solution:

• a CLI that runs inside your CI
• an orchestrator backend that triggers the CI jobs (GitHub App or self-hosted)

You can however still use the most basic features of Digger as a standalone action without a backend. To do that, set the following option in your workflow configuration:

# add this to .github/actions/digger_backendless_workflow.yml as an argument to the digger step
no-backend: true

You’d also need to add pull_request and issue_comment workflow triggers:

on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "main" ]
    types: [ opened, synchronize ]
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]
  workflow_dispatch:

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Limitations

Historically this was the original way of running Digger. The initial version called “tfrun” didn’t have any backend, it was just a GitHub action. But it quickly became apparent that without some sort of orchestration there’s only so much that can be done:

• No concurrency; all plans / applies need to run sequentially, which is slow
• Action starts on every push or comment, often just to detect that there are no changes. That’s expensive, especially in large repos.
• Clashing applies from other jobs will fail as they cannot be queued
• Buckets / tables for PR-level locks need to be configured manually in your cloud account
• Comments and status checks will be updated with a delay

For many small teams this is more than enough and it is quite easy to setup, if it works for you please don’t hesitate to use digger in this manner.

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How it works

In order to function without a backend digger still needs store information about the PR locks so that it does not run “terraform plan” in 2 different PRs for the same digger project (since that would cause them stepping on top of eachother). In order to achieve that, digger will create a small resource in your cloud account to store which PR locked which project. The type of resource varies depending on the cloud account, here is what gets created:

In case of AWS, during the first run digger will create this resource for you. However in case of GCP and azure you need to create it yourself and supply it as an argument.

After the resource is created digger will continue to use it for subsequent runs in order to store information about the locks and function correctly.