sdk-container-builds VS cargo-chef

You can also publish .NET apps/services directly as container images [1].

Or you can distribute them as a single file, standalone, "ready to run" application, which precompiles your methods and includes the JIT. This results in a larger executable, but keeps all the functionality, including reflection and runtime code generation, intact.

And, of course, you can install .NET core directly on your Linux system, just as you would for Python or Ruby (where you also don't usually rely on the default installation).

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/docker/publish...

If you're using the https://github.com/dotnet/sdk-container-builds tech to build containers, we're working on a 0.4 version of that package that applies this rootless user by default - the goal is that the SDK tooling is the smoothest, least-effort pathway to secure, correct, best-practice containers for all .NET applications!

Alternatively, here's Microsoft's own documentation about how to do all of the above: https://github.com/dotnet/sdk-container-builds/blob/main/docs/GettingStarted.md

We've been baking this functionality directly into the .NET SDK for a couple releases now: https://github.com/dotnet/sdk-container-builds

It's really nice to derive mostly-complete container images from information your build system already has available, and the speed/UX benefits are great too!

Funny you should mention scaffolding out a Dockerfile - internally we'd been talking about that as a bridge to other services that are highly Dockerfile-based. I just logged https://github.com/dotnet/sdk-container-builds/issues/146 to track this request. We likely won't prioritize it for the 7.0 release unless we get huge amounts of feedback that it would be helpful, but it is something we'd like to do.

CI time. Do you want to micromanage your own docker images for all your CI? Great! If not, yes you do. In fact, you want to manage a docker image to build a docker image to use for CI. Use cargo-chef to prepare a build image with your dependencies pre-built if you want to do fine-grained build/test pipelines. Oh also, there's no jUnit test report generation, that was killed off today. (YES, SORRY, I'm still salty.)

Have you looked at cargo-chef? It supposedly speeds up compilation times if you're using Docker.

A tool already exists for this called Cargo-chef, and it works extremely well.

At work I've use Dockerfile and cargo-chef to improve build times. You can also look into buildkit cache mounts, but this approach is rarely super effective on hosted CI because they start from scratch on most runs. In the context of Rust specifically you may also see the target directory reflect unbounded data growth if it's reused over and over across revisions. because cargo by default won't expire older intermediate artifacts. Cargo-sweep can help with that but I wouldn't pursue this in a CI effort. This will affect both "native" builds and buildkit cache mounts if you're persisting the target directory.

We create an empty Rust binary with cargo new, this is a simple way to get Docker layer caching to work. For a more robust solution, you may want to check out cargo-chef.

If this ends up being a cleaner/easier way to having to workaround super expensive rebuilds for Rust given cache + deps compared to this https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/cargo-chef , reading this thread will have been a huge win for me (and hopefully others).

Whether introducing Bazel is easier/worth it, subjective I guess.

I did a talk (slides here) about this a few years ago, it took a bit of work to get the build caching working with cargo. As others have pointed out, there is now cargo chef to solve this problem so you probably don't have to deal with the issues I saw, but I thought it still might be helpful context.

I'm curious if you've tried out cargo-chef, I've had some decent improvements with it but I wonder how it stacks up to the sccache approach (don't have the time to try it out myself right now).

for CI have you tried to use buildkit persistent runners with caching + https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/cargo-chef ?

If you're deploying Rust with Docker I can tell you that cargo-chef is invaluable. With zero work it caches the dependency fetch and compilation steps. Most of the time the ens Docker deploy is closer to an incremental compile than full.