docker2exe: Convert a Docker image to an executable

https://github.com/rzane/docker2exe

130•alexmolas•2d ago

Comments

Epskampie•16h ago

> Requirements on the executing device: Docker is required.

alumic•16h ago

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

Pack it in, guys. No magic today.

stingraycharles•7h 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_•16h 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•16h 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.

matsemann•16h ago

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.

rzzzt•15h ago

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

endofreach•1h ago

> my keys copied in as well for instance.

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.

lelanthran•14h 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 don't understand this requirement/specification; presumably this use-case will not be satisfied by a shell script, but I don't see how.

What are you wanting from this use-case that can't be done with a shell script?

lazide•11h ago

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.

lelanthran•10h ago

> 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?

lazide•6h ago

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.

james_marks•6h ago

An icon a non-technical user can click to run it.

cmeacham98•4h ago

A non-technical user that has docker installed?

johncs•14h 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•11h ago

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

worldsayshi•10h ago

But now you have two problems.

throwanem•10h ago

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.

Hamuko•16h 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•15h 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•12h 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•7h ago

See the dockerc comment above

arjvik•12h ago

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

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

hnuser123456•6h ago

That screenshot in the readme is hilarious. Nice project.

dheera•5h 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.

rcfox•5h ago

Doesn't podman get around a lot of those issues?

dheera•4h ago

Aw hell, more band-aids because people don't want to get software distribution done right.

Can we please go back to the days of sudo dpkg -i foo.deb and then just /usr/bin/foo ?

vinceguidry•4h ago

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.

remram•40m ago

Docker is not emulation so there's no waste of resources.

vinceguidry•4h ago

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

ecnahc515•3h ago

Instead it requires QEMU!

ugh123•2h 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.

dowager_dan99•1h ago

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?

Hamuko•36m ago

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.

remram•39m 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•16h ago

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

revskill•16h ago

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

RachelF•15h ago

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

revskill•11h ago

It is a joke.

sitkack•8h ago

When it happens, will it be more or less funny?

arjav0703•16h 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•15h 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•14h ago

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

renewiltord•13h ago

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

kkapelon•15h ago

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

aussieguy1234•15h 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.

sunrunner•13h 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•13h ago

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

wojtek1942•13h 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?

sunrunner•13h 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•13h ago

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

xandrius•13h 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.

hereonout2•12h 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.

kevmo314•6h ago

PyTorch essentially landed on the same bundling CUDA solution, so you're at least in good company.

hereonout2•5h ago

Yep, then I have some projects that have pytorch dependencies which use it's own bundled CUDA and non-pytorch dependencies that use a CUDA in the usual system wide include path.

So CUDA gets packaged up in the container twice unless I start building everything from source or messing about with RPATHs!

anthk•10h ago

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

hereonout2•9h ago

Docker / containers are more than just that though. Using it allows your golang process to be isolated and integrated into the rest of your tooling, deployment pipelines, etc.

anthk•8h ago

It's go; that could be trivially done with a script.

Heck, you can even cross compile go code for any architecture to another one (even for different OSes), and docker would be useless there unless docker has mechanisms to bind qemu-$ARCH with containers and binfmt.

jjice•5h ago

I'd argue that having it in a Docker container is much easier to integrate with the rest of many people's infra. On ECS, K8s, or similar? Docker is such an easy layer to slap on and it'll fit in easily in that situation.

Are you running on bare servers? Sure, a Go binary and a script is fine.

hereonout2•4h ago

Yep, it's using docker as a means of delivery really. Especially in larger organisations this is just the done thing now.

I understand what the OP is saying but not sure they get this context.

If I were working in that world still I might have that single binary, and a script, but I'm old school and would probably make an RPM package and add a systemd unit file and some log rotate configs too!

endofreach•1h 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-linux host, all of that runs then in a VM on the host... just... to run a golang backend which is already compiled to a binary?

Alex_001•13h 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•12h ago

> or bundling CLIs without asking people to install Docker.

Except it requires people to install Docker.

hda111•12h 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•12h ago

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

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