lol guy makes a fair point. Open source software suffers from this expectation that anyone interested in the project must be technical enough to be able to clone, compile, and fix the inevitable issues just to get something running and usable.
I'd say that a lot of people suffer from this expectation that just because I made a tool for myself and put it up on GitHub in case someone else would also enjoy it that I'm now obligated to provide support for you. Especially when the person in the screenshot is angry over the lack of a Windows binary.
Thank goodness; solving this "problem" for the general internet destroyed it.
Your point seems to be someone else should do that for every stupid asshole on the web?
But will this run inside another docker container?
I normally hate things shipped as containers because I often want to use it inside a docker container and docker-in-docker just seems like a messy waste of resources.
Docker in Docker is not a waste of resources, they just make the same container runtime the container is running on available to it. Really a better solution than a control plane like Kubernetes.
No, you're running docker inside a docker container. The container provides a docker daemon that just forwards the connection to the same runtime. It's not running two dockers, but you are still running docker inside docker.
Yeah, it feels like nothing but a little trick. Why would anyone want to actually use this? The exe simply calls docker, it can embed an image into the exe but even then it first calls docker to load the embedded image.
Presumably, they don’t want to write/maintain a shell script wrapper for every time they want to do this, when they could use a tool which does it for them.
> Presumably, they don’t want to write/maintain a shell script wrapper for every time they want to do this, when they could use a tool which does it for them.
How's "packing" cli commands into a shell script any different from "packing" CLI commands into a container?
Calling a container on the CLI is a pain in the ass.
People generally don’t put stuff that works in whatever environment you’re in on the CLI already into contains. Stuff that doesn’t, of course they do.
Having a convenient shell script wrapper to make that not a pain in the ass, while letting all the environment management stuff still work correctly in a container is convenient.
Writing said wrapper each time, however is a pain in the ass.
Generating one, makes it not such a pain in the ass to use.
So then you get convenient CLI usage of something that needs a container to not be a pain in the ass to install/use.
I do that for a lot of stuff. Got a bit annoyed with internal tools that was so difficult to set up (needed this exact version of global python, expected this and that to be in the path, constantly needed to be updated and then stuff broke again). So I built a docker image instead where everything is managed, and when I need to update or change stuff I can do it from a clean slate without affecting anything else on my computer.
To use it, it's basically just scripts loaded into my shell. So if I do "toolname command args" it will spin up the container, mount the current folder and some config folders some tools expect, forward some ports, then pass the command and args to the container which runs them.
99% of the time it works smooth. The annoying part is if some tool depends on some other tool on the host machine. Like for instance it wants to do some git stuff. I will then have to have git installed and my keys copied in as well for instance.
CoreOS had a toolbox container that worked similarly to the one you have (the Podman people took over its maintenance): https://github.com/containers/toolbox
Tip: you could also forward your ssh agent. I remember it was a bit of a pain in the ass on macos and a windows WSL2 setup, but likely worth it for your setup.
Basically the same as Python’s zipapps which have some niche use cases.
Before zipapp came out I built superzippy to do it. Needed to distribute some python tooling to users in a university where everyone was running Linux in lab computers. Worked perfectly for it.
The first of which can be p90 solved by "Okay, type 'apt install dash capital why docker return,' tell me what happens...okay, and 'docker dash vee' says...great! Now..."
Probably takes a couple minutes, maybe less if you've got a good fast distro mirror nearby. More if you're trying to explain it to a biologist - love those folks, they do great work, incredible parties, not always at home in the digital domain.
I feel like it's much easier to send a docker run snippet than an executable binary to my Docker-using friends. I usually try to include an example `docker run` and/or Docker Compose snippet in my projects too.
Is there any alternative way of achieving a similar goal (shipping a container to non technical customers that they can run as if it were an application)?
It feels like there ought to be a way to wrap a UML kernel build with a container image. Never seen it done, but I can't think of an obvious reason why it wouldn't work.
