alt Hacker NewsI’m inclined to agree with you about not building containers. That said, I find myself going around in circles. We have an app that uses a specific toolchain version, how do we install that version on a build machine without requiring an SRE ticket to update our toolchain?
Containers nicely solve this problem. Then your builds get a little slow, so you want to cache things. Now your docker file looks like this. You want to run some tests - now it’s even more complicated. How do you debug those tests? How do those tests communicate with external systems (database/redis). Eventually you end up back at “let’s just containerise the packaging”.
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Depending on how the container is structured, you could have the original container as a baseline default, and then have "enhanced" containers that use it as a base and overlay the caching and other errata to serve that specialized need.
You can mount the current directory into docker and run an image of your tool.
Here's an example of that from the docker maven.
`docker run -it --rm --name my-maven-project -v "$(pwd)":/usr/src/mymaven -w /usr/src/mymaven maven:3.3-jdk-8 mvn clean install`
You can get as fancy as you like with things like your `.m2` directory, this just gives you the basics of how you'd do that.