dwarves — the idiot guide
What is this? dwarves is the little robot smithy that builds, tests and ships all the nordisk software. In Norse myth, Brokkr and Sindri were the dwarf brothers who forged the gods' greatest treasures. This is our forge.
The one weird trick: it's all Rust. Most projects glue their CI together with shell scripts and YAML. dwarves doesn't — every step is a normal Rust command you run with cargo xtask …. If it breaks, you debug it like any other Rust program.
Who does the heavy lifting? Two friends:
- nornir — the master builder. dwarves asks nornir to build, test, bench and release things. dwarves never re-does that work itself.
- holger — the warehouse. Finished artifacts get stored in holger, and anything a build needs gets pulled from holger — even with no internet.
Leave it running (the daemon). Type dwarves serve and the forge stays up as a little server. Once a minute it checks each pipeline's schedule and, if it's due, builds it — and it remembers what it already ran, so restarting the server never double-fires or skips a job. Point the dwarves command at it with --server <url> and you're driving the running forge instead of a one-shot build on your laptop.
That's the whole idea: a pure-Rust forge that tells nornir what to build and hands the results to holger. No shell, no mystery.