dinker VS nixery

(Self plug) I had the same thoughts as the author, and made this: https://github.com/andrewbaxter/dinker . Like stated in the article, if you're doing rust or go all you want is to dump the binary in the image. There's no reason to do the build inside the docker vm in that case, and it's super fast, and only uses dumb filesystem access - no daemons like docker, weird wip container managers like buildah, etc.

Self hoisting here, I put this together to make it easier to generate single (extra) layer docker images without needing a docker agent, capabilities, chroot, etc: https://github.com/andrewbaxter/dinker

Caveat: it doesn't work on Fly.io. They seem to be having some issue with OCI manifests: https://github.com/containers/skopeo/issues/1881 . They're also having issues with new docker versions pushing from CI: https://community.fly.io/t/deploying-to-fly-via-github-actio... ... the timing of this post seems weird.

FWIW the article says

> create a Docker image, also known as an OCI image

I don't think this is quite right. From my investigation, Docker and OCI images are basically content addressed trees, starting with a root manifest that points to other files and their hashes (root -> images -> layers -> layer configs + files). The OCI manifests and configs are separate to Docker manifests and configs and basically Docker will support both side by side.

The ones from https://nixery.dev/

You can build your own with https://nixery.dev/

I built a service for doing this ad-hoc via image names a few years ago and it enjoys some popularity with CI & debugging use-cases: https://nixery.dev/

name is eerily similar to `nixpkgs`, i.e. the monorepo that defines all packages and one of the underlying technologies here. i get the play on buildpacks, but still, as a nix user it makes me do a double take reading the name

this is neat though, and in political terms, the elevator pitch mentions nix itself as an implementation detail in passing. hopefully, if this catches on, it'll function as a non-threatening gateway drug to nix itself, when users inevitably go digging into the weeds

for anyone interested, prior art on the nix container front: https://nixery.dev

Wow, this is excellent! At a previous job, we had been using k8s + knative to spin up containers on demand, and likewise were unhappy with the delays. Spawner seems excellent.

One question: have you had to do any custom container builds on demand, and if so, have you had to deal with large containers (e.g. a Python base image with a few larger packages installed from PyPI)? We would run up against extremely long build image times using tools like kaniko, and caching would typically have only a limited benefit.

I was experimenting using Nix to maybe solve some of these problems, but never got far enough to run a speed test, and then left the job before finishing. But it seems to me some sort of algorithm like Nixery uses (https://nixery.dev) to generate cacheable layers with completely repeatable builds and nothing extraneous would help.

Maybe that's not a problem you had to solve, but if it is, I'd love your thoughts.

Nixery – Docker images on the fly with Nix\ (38 comments)