Farm Runner

What is Farm Runner?

Farm (the binary, sometimes called Farm Runner) is the piece of Farmland that runs your build commands. You can use it as a simple replacement for Make by invoke it directly (farm build) for local development, or Buddy invokes it on your behalf when a webhook / dashboard click triggers a build. So Buddy calls exactly the same story as a developer would do locally.

Farm is fully isolated from the rest of Farmland: it parses your farmfile, resolves variants, walks the dependency graph, and shells out to your build commands. It has no network dependency on Farmland to do its job. It is basically an executor, a runner.

Two principles, one binary

• Open source. Farm Runner will be open-sourced. Audit the execution engine yourself. No mystery binaries running your builds.
• Standalone. Farm is a self-contained binary, completely isolated from Buddy. It parses your farmfile locally and executes the actual work. No network calls to Farmland for command execution. If Farmland is offline, Farm still runs.

The farmfile

A farmfile sits at the root of your repo and declares stages, variants, and dependencies. Tiny example:

[operation.build]
work: cargo build --profile $VARIANT
input: Cargo.toml, **/*.rs
output: target/debug/*

[operation.test]
work: cargo test --profile $VARIANT
after: build

Run farm build --variant=release from your repo and Farm Runner walks the graph: build first, then test (because test depends on build). Each stage is a regular shell command — Farm doesn't care what language you build in.

Local-first, cloud-optional

Run Farm without Buddy or Farmland at all and you still get: parallel-by-default execution, operation input/output caching, attributable resource limits, and a structured event log on stdout or dependency graph overview. Pair Farm with Buddy and the same execution picks up routing (which buddy?), dispatch (queue / priorities), and reporting (encrypted logs to your cloud bucket, status back to GitHub / GitLab).

Read more

• Buddy Agent — the control-plane agent that pairs with Farm
• Source on GitHub (farmland-labs)
• What's new