docker2exe: Convert a Docker image to an executable

https://github.com/rzane/docker2exe

by alexmolas • 1 year ago

142 90 1 year ago

github.com

Epskampie• 1 year ago

Requirements on the executing device: Docker is required.

alumic• 1 year ago

I was so blown away by the title and equally disappointed to discover this line.

Pack it in, guys. No magic today.

stingraycharles• 1 year ago

Thank god there’s still this project that can build single executables that work on multiple OS’es, I’m still amazed by that level of magic.

harha_• 1 year ago

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.

jve• 1 year ago

I see a use case. The other day I wished that I could pack CLI commands as docker containers and execute them as CLI commands and get return codes.

I haven't tried this stuff, but maybe this is something in that direction.

johncs• 1 year ago

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.

j45• 1 year ago

Could be ease of use for end users who don't docker.

Hamuko2• 1 year ago

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.

drawfloat• 1 year ago

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)?

regularfry• 1 year ago

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.

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

See the dockerc comment above

arjvik• 1 year ago

Good friend built dockerc[1] which doesn't have this limitation!

[1] https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc

hnuser123456• 1 year ago

That screenshot in the readme is hilarious. Nice project.

dheera2• 1 year ago

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.

vinceguidry3• 1 year ago

Looks like MacOS and Windows support is still being worked on.

ecnahc515• 1 year ago

Instead it requires QEMU!

ugh123• 1 year ago

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.

remram2• 1 year ago

I can't tell what this does from the readme. Does it package a container runtime in the exe? Or a virtual machine? Something else?

cik• 1 year ago

It sounds like docker export and makeself combined. We already ship to select customers prebuilt containers exactly this way.

revskill2• 1 year ago

So baiscally i could bundle the linux os as an exe and run in windows.

RachelF• 1 year ago

you need "Docker for Windows", which runs a Linux VM which then runs Docker.

revskill2• 1 year ago

It is a joke.

arjav0703• 1 year ago

This is useful if you want to share your container (probably something that is prod ready) to someone who knows nothing about docker. An usecase would be, you built a custom software for someone's business/usecase and they are the only one using that particular container.

dennydai• 1 year ago

Just use shebang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987109

#!/usr/bin/env -S bash -c "docker run -p 8080:8080 -it --rm \$(docker build --progress plain -f \$0 . 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr | grep -oP 'sha256:[0-9a-f]*')"

cess11• 1 year ago

That's bat guano insane, but I still like it more than TFA.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

It's not that crazy. Another fun use is with a `uv run` shebang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42855258

tomjakubowski• 1 year ago

Note to others who might like to write long shebangs: the -S argument there to /usr/bin/env is load-bearing, and if you forget it weird stuff will happen, at least on most Linux systems. I wrote about it a few years ago, based on a true story. https://crystae.net/posts/two-shebang-papercuts/

kkapelon• 1 year ago

This is just a simpler wrapper over the docker executable that you need to have installed anyway.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

On Linux, there would be little to no performance penalty to something like this since Docker is just fancy chroot, re using the same kernel as the host.

But not on other platforms. They are the same but run Linux in a VM.

sunrunner2• 1 year ago

I'm just as disappointed as I was when I first heard about being able to create 'Self-contained Executable Programs with Deno Compile', perhaps slightly more even as at least that bundled the interpreter.

In all seriousness, Docker as a requirement for end-users to create an executable seems like a 'shift-right' approach to deployment effort, as in, instead of doing the work to make a usable standalone executable, a bunch of requirements for users are just pushed on to them. In some cases your users might be technical, but even then Docker only seems to makes sense when its kept inside an environment where the assumption of a container runtime is there.

I assume extra steps are needed to allow the 'executable' to access filesystem resources, making it sandboxed but not in a way that's helpful for end users?

7bit• 1 year ago

Docker as a requirement for end-users is terrible no matter what.

wojtek1942• 1 year ago

Why the disappointment with Deno compile? I have not used it but from the website it seems that the end user does not need Deno to be installed. What is the shortcoming you are referring to?

sunrunner2• 1 year ago

It's not a fair comparison on my part but before reading through the docs some of the initial wording around Deno compile seemed to imply (or I inferred) that a platform native executable would be produced from the process. Wishful thinking on my part I guess.

Other languages like Golang making it relatively easy to build _native_ programs and to cross-compile them makes it a solid choice CLI tools, and I was genuinely hoping that more tooling like that was coming to other ecosystems. Perhaps naive to expect a shift like that for a language that's always been interpreted, but I like when I can run developer tools as native programs instead of ending up with various versions of a runtime installed (npx doesn't _solve_ this problem, merely works around it).

rullopat• 1 year ago

It's great for sending your 6 GB hello world exe to your friends I suppose

xandrius2• 1 year ago

The beauty of docker is that it is a reflection of how much someone cares about deployments: do you care about being efficient? You can use `scratch` or `X-alpine`. Do you simply not care and just want things to work? Always go for `ubuntu` and you're good to go!

You can have a full and extensive api backend in golang, having a total image size of 5-6MB.

hereonout24• 1 year ago

I've done both, tiny scratch based images with a single go binary to full fat ubuntu based things.

What is killing me at the moment is deploying Docker based AI applications.

The CUDA base images come in at several GB to start with, then typically a whole host of python dependencies will be added with things like pytorch adding almost a GB of binaries.

Typically the application code is tiny as it's usually just python, but then you have the ML model itself. These can be many GB too, so you need to decide whether to add it to the image or mount it as a volume, regardless it needs to make it's way onto the deployment target.

I'm currently delivering double digit GB docker images to different parts of my organisation which raises eyebrows. I'm not sure a way around it though, it's less a docker problem and more an AI / CUDA issue.

Docker fits current workflows but I can't help feeling having custom VM images for this type of thing would be more efficient.

anthk2• 1 year ago

Golang should not need docker. It's statically built.

endofreach2• 1 year ago

You can have a full and extensive api backend in golang, having a total image size of 5-6MB.

So people are building docker "binaries", that depend on docker installed on the host, to run a container inside a container on the host– or even better, on a non-linux host, all of that then runs in a VM on the host... just... to run a golang application that is... already compiled to a binary?

Alex_001• 1 year ago

This is super cool — especially for sharing tools with non-technical users or bundling CLIs without asking people to install Docker. Packaging infra-heavy apps into a simple .exe could really smooth out distribution. Curious how it handles startup time and embedded filesystem size.

shric• 1 year ago

or bundling CLIs without asking people to install Docker.

Except it requires people to install Docker.

hda111• 1 year ago

Why? Would be easier to embed both podman and the image in one executable to create a self-contained file. No docker needed.

PicassoCTs• 1 year ago

So, does this work with a dockerswarm? As in a whole services swarm- get converted down into a monolith?

isaacimagine• 1 year ago

See also: dockerc

https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc

ransom1538• 1 year ago

Ah finally. We have finished where we started.

blueflow• 1 year ago

That was my first thought. Back in the days you gave your friends a stand-alone *.COM program on a floppy. We have come full circle on static linking.

rietta• 1 year ago

I remember thinking that the Visual Basic runtime was unacceptable bloat overhead and now this. Cool work though. Also reminds me of self extracting WinZip files.

sitkack2• 1 year ago

At some point in the future we will be nostalgic for the monstrosities of the present.

int_19h3• 1 year ago

"ChatGPT, execute this natural language description of what the program should do"

int_19h3• 1 year ago

I remember those times, as well. There was an amusing (in retrospect) period in late 90s - early 00s where one of the metrics for RAD tools of the day was how large a hello world type app is. Delphi was so popular then in part because it did very well on that metric - the baseline was on the order of 300 Kb, if I remember correctly, and you could have fairly complicated apps under 1 Mb. Visual Basic was decidedly meh on that count because between your EXE and MSVBVM60.DLL, it wouldn't fit on a single 1.44 Mb floppy.

fifilura3• 1 year ago

Docker is mostly backend, but I wonder how far we are from universally executable native applications?

I.e. download this linux/mac/windows application to your windows/linux/mac computer.

Double-click to run.

Seems like all bits and pieces are already there, just need to put them together.

ivewonyoung• 1 year ago

How different would that be from Flatpak

fifilura3• 1 year ago

Does it make linux applications run on Windows or mac?

woodrowbarlow2• 1 year ago

https://justine.lol/ape.html -- αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

this works for actual compiled code. no vm, no runtime, no interpreter, no container. native compiled machine code. just download and double-click, no matter which OS you use.

Piskvorrr4• 1 year ago

"Please note this is intended for people who don't care about desktop GUIs, and just want stdio and sockets without devops toil."

lucasoshiro• 1 year ago

universally executable native applications

To achieve that you'll need some kind of compatibility layer. Perhaps something like wine? Or WSL? Or a VM?

Then you'll have what we already have with JVM and similar

Piskvorrr4• 1 year ago

The devil is in the details.

What do you mean, "requires Windows 11"? What is even "glibc" and why do I need a different version on this Linux machine? How do I tell that the M4 needs an "arm64", why not a leg64 and how is this not amd64?

In other words, it's very simple in theory - but the actual landscape is far, FAR more fragmented than a mere "that's a windows/linux/mac box, here's a windows/linux/mac executable, DONE"

(And that's for an application without a GUI.)

fifilura3• 1 year ago

Yes, it is difficult, but difficult problems have been solved before.

With dependency management systems, docker, package managers.

MacOS and Windows is closed source and that is of course a problem, I guess the first demo would be universally runnable linux executable on Windows.

nine_k• 1 year ago

Tired: docker run.

Wired: docker2exe.

Inspired: AppImage.

(I'll show myself out.)

docker2exe: Convert a Docker image to an executable

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