Nix for better Dockerfile (hopefully)

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1

Currently, my Dockerfile looks like this:

FROM debian:stable-slim as builder  # 30 MB only

RUN # install build deps

RUN # bring in the code, compile

FROM debian:stable-slim as runner

RUN # install runtime deps

COPY --from=builder /install-prefix /install-prefix

And believe it or not, I messed up a runtime dep :slight_smile:

I was wondering if nix could help with this. I’m not troubled with the 100MB nixos/nix for the builder stage, but for runner, I’d like to keep as small as possible. I also use tini for the runner, so using systemd is out for that.

2

You can build really minimal images reproducibly with nix: NixOS - Nixpkgs 21.11 manual

It even allows some imperative RUN-like build steps.

Is that what you’re interested in? Or rather the contents of the image? Nix can help with both, but it can be a bit more difficult to build complex images with nix. I’d personally argue that’s an antipattern anyway, but some people like running whole init systems in there…

1 Like
3

I’ve been wanting to reproduce this:

…but I didn’t have time