What is dinghy?

Dinghy lets you write and manage Spinnaker pipelines the same way you'd manage code, by storing them in GitHub and updating them through pull requests instead of clicking through a web interface. Spinnaker is a tool for automating software deployments. Normally, you'd build deployment pipelines by hand using Spinnaker's UI, which gets tedious and hard to review. Dinghy changes this by letting you define pipelines as text files in a Git repository. You create reusable pieces (called stage and task templates) that you can mix and match to build complete pipelines. When you push changes to GitHub, Dinghy automatically detects the update through webhooks and rebuilds the pipeline in Spinnaker. If you update a template, Dinghy knows which pipelines depend on it and refreshes those too. The workflow looks like this: you write a pipeline definition file (like a blueprint) that references stage templates. These templates are stored in a GitHub repository and contain placeholder values you can customize. When the template or pipeline definition changes, GitHub sends a notification to Dinghy, which parses the files, fills in any variables, and syncs the result back to Spinnaker. This keeps everything in version control, makes it easy to review changes, and lets your team collaborate on deployment logic the same way they do on code. Teams that manage multiple deployment pipelines, especially at companies running several applications or microservices, would find this useful. Instead of each developer learning Spinnaker's UI, they can write YAML or JSON files, commit them, get code review, and let Dinghy handle the rest. It's particularly valuable if you already use GitHub for source control and want a consistent workflow across your infrastructure. The project is built in Go and needs a running instance of Spinnaker (along with specific services like Redis and Front50) to work. The README also mentions that Dinghy integrates with the Armory CLI tool if you want to validate pipelines locally before pushing them up.