Dockpack

basic library for distributing files via docker

This tool is for unpacking the files from a Docker image into a directory, essentially enabling you to use Docker to distribute files. Because Docker is integrated into every major cloud provider and CI/CD tool, and has caching and version control built-in, you can use Dockpack to package and distribute private code libraries of any language. You can also combine multiple projects and tools in different language into a single Docker image for distribution. I've personally used this tool todistribute private Rust code libraries, trained ML models, and private python packages. I've also used it to bundle multiple tools and scripts together to setup a build package for servers.

Installation

I plan on supporting brew and apt get in the future but for now you can install the tool with cargo by using the following command:

cargo install dockpack

Unpacking files from a Docker image

To unpack the files from a Docker image into a directory, you can the following pull command:

dockpack pull -i <image> -d <directory>

For a toy example, you can unpack the maxwellflitton/nan-one image into a directory called cache with the command below:

dockpack pull -i maxwellflitton/nan-one -d cache

This will give you the following file structure:

├── cache
│   ├── Cargo.toml
│   ├── src
│   │   └── lib.rs
│   └── tar
│       ├── <Various tar files from the Docker image>

Packing files into a Docker image

I am working on a push command for later versions. However, for now, just use Docker and the scratch image. For instance, you can have the following Dockerfile:

FROM scratch

COPY ./some_dir .

Then build the image with the following command:

docker build . \
--platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64,linux/arm/v7,linux/arm/v6,linux/s390x,linux/ppc64le \
-t <IMAGE_REPO> \
--push

We must add all the platforms to ensure that the image can be run on any architecture as we don't have anything to run in the image, just files to unpack.

Future features

• Add a push command to pack files into a Docker image
• Add a ls command to list all the unpacked images
• Add a rm command to remove unpacked images
• Add data store for tracking unpacked images and their locations
• Add an update command to update downloaded images in their existing directories
• Add buckets for bundling multiple images together for distribution
• Dynamic C library so other languages can directly interact with core functionalities to build on top of it.