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:

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:

​

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