Workgroup:Container

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We are interested in directly building (minimal) OCI containers from the nixpkgs ecosystem.

People

• Profpatsch
• Lewo
• MoreTea

Tooling

• opencontainers.org
  • runc: spawn and run OCI containers (nixpkgs: runc)
  • image-spec: container image specification
  • runtime-spec: container runtime specification
  • image-tools: tools for working with the image-spec
  • runtime-tools: tools for working with the runtime-spec
  • umoci: intends to be a complete manipulation tool for OCI images with a rootless mode
• projectatomic.io
  • skopeo: modify and inspect images on registries (nixpkgs: skopeo)
  • buildah: build/generate OCI images (nixpkgs: buildah)
• containers Github project: golang libraries for interacting with containers
  • image: library used by skopeo
  • oci-fetch: CLI tool for fetching OCI containers over various transports
• awakesecurity
  • hocker: fetch from docker (v2) registry and generate nix derivations

Nix images

There are a few images that contain Nix with various trade-offs:

• nixos/nix (source) - 77 MB - Official images based on alpine using a Dockerfile. Not updated automatically.
• nixorg/nix (source) - 84 MB - Batteries included by the Nix Community group also based on a Dockerfile but only using Nixpkgs dependencies. Images are automatically built from master.
• lnl7/nix/ (source) - 57 MB - Images built out of a Nix derivation.

Interesting threads

• https://github.com/projectatomic/buildah/issues/386: about rootless support

Work In Progress

• Improve image storage in the Nix store

https://github.com/projectatomic/skopeo/issues/481

Projects

Self-Hosted, Minimal Docker/OSI Images

For our platform at Techcultivation we want to generate docker images for all parts of our system. Those images should come in two flavors, development (to quickly spin up local test services, with mock data) and deployment (secure/production-ready). We chose to generate these images purely out of nixpkgs code, so no binary (base) images have to be included.

The current version of the deployment code can be found on our Gitlab.

A basic (pretty messy) postgres image is already done, complete with in-build setup of a mock database. The resulting image is smaller than the “official” one in the docker registry, only uses nixpkgs-native dependencies and only contains the most minimal filetree needed to run the postgres binary.

Still to do: rabbitmq, frontend code, api, refactor, various others.

— Profpatsch (talk) 02:47, 10 February 2018 (UTC)