rocker VS buildkit

I am, strictly speaking, not a big R user, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but if I were using R extensively, I would absolutely use the Rocker project containers to manage different R versions and different sets of dependencies for different projects: https://rocker-project.org/

Perhaps the main difference is r package are not available as binaries from rstudio (posit) repo but their is a cran2copr repo that works really well or you can still install from source in your home. For more info on cran2copr see: https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/fedora/ . Personally I am slowly moving to container based workflow with podman (and not toolbox as you end up having your r package install directly in home but that can be worked out by specifying the ribs path). I use docker image from the rocker project: https://rocker-project.org/

If you have such specific requirements it’s often easier to use a container like the one from rocker (runs in der docker) instead. Btw wouldn’t be surprised if you’d get the latest version running in there as well.

Check out the Rocker Project, comprising of Docker containers for R, and can be used with RStudio. Also, virtual environments e.g., renv package can also help solve the package versioning issue, aside from containerization, and is transferable to a new machine via the renv::restore() function.

https://hub.docker.com/u/rocker has a lot of R-related images and they look pretty legit (look at "Tags" to find different versions). Don't use weird looking images. There's a lot of malware out there. Here's a guide on nice docker files: https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/dockerfile\_best-practices/

Other people have mentioned renv and packrat already (hasn't renv basically superseded packrat at this point?), but what is also nearly ready-made to deal with this is rocker's R images. They have a bunch of images preconfigured for typical TidyVerse stuff, Shiny, etc.

The Apple M1 is ARM. As far as my knowledge, ARM isn't supported. Looks like the rocker project is aware of it. Considering how popular these chips are, i'm confident a lot of smart people are working on it. :)

But, with docker, there are many prebuilt images provided by the RStudio team directly, and other great repositories from rocker. These are basically images for your full SDLC with R, from development to deployments.

> We are uding docker-in-docker at the moment

You can also run a "less privileged" container with all the features of Docker by using rootless buildkit in Kubernetes. Here are some examples:

https://github.com/moby/buildkit/tree/master/examples/kubern...

https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/examples/kubern...

It's also possible to run dedicated buildkitd workers and connect to them remotely.

- BuildOp evaluates its input as additional LLB operations to add to the graph to allow for dynamic build graphs (also unused in the Dockerfile frontend)

With the Dockerfile Explorer, we run the Dockerfile frontend[1] that BuildKit uses inside of WASM to parse and produce the LLB output locally in your browser. We then embed the Monaco Editor so that you can change your Dockerfile to see how it impacts the LLB output that BuildKit will use to build your Docker image.

You can see a quick video and read more details on how it all works here: https://depot.dev/blog/dockerfile-explorer.

We'd love any feedback or ideas folks would like around this type of tool!

[0] https://github.com/moby/buildkit#exploring-llb

Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):

There's a 2-year-old moby/buildkit GitHub issue about frequent build cache misses when using the BuildKit docker-container driver and multi-stage builds. Anyone else in this sub run into this problem and/or have reasonable workarounds? It seems like something that should come up pretty often.

A couple months ago I encountered a bug in buildkit - when enabling OpenTelemetry tracing, we got occasional panics. With a bit of investigation, we found the cause, fixed and tested in our fork and internal deployments, and pushed to upstream.

I do some search in the internet and there seems to be no good solution, so I just create a feature request: https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3859

Yeah, only Linux containers at the moment, BuildKit is the way we are constructing pipelines and doing caching. Split on if we will support non-linux hosts, but definitely want to find a good solution to not doing Docker-in-Docker.

Relevant issues are https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3011 and https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/1512.