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Dockerfiles are a mostly adequate prototyping tool but are not great for generating production builds. Lack of modularity, cascading versioning / dependency man
by barrkel 7y ago
Dockerfiles are a mostly adequate prototyping tool but are not great for generating production builds. Lack of modularity, cascading versioning / dependency management, reproducible builds, ... every time I've used Dockerfiles in anger I've cobbled together another 60% of a build system out of bash scripts.
I wish Dockerfiles would just fade away into the background, and be replaced by something more similar to an archiver but with better integration with repositories and versioning metadata.
- itamarst 7y agoThere are some people trying to build alternative toolchains for Docker builds that remove Dockerfiles altogether, e.g. https://buildpacks.io/ https://buildpacks.io/ and (in a very different approach) Nix-based builds. My personal approach for Python applications' Docker packaging (https://pythonspeed.com/products/pythoncontainer/ https://pythonspeed.com/products/pythoncontainer/) was similar to yours: wrap the build process in a script. I wrote it in Python rather than bash, so it's more maintainable, but a Ruby shop might want to write theirs in Ruby, etc..