[Container-tools] Community Node.js Builder Images

[Lance Ball]

Hi all

You may have seen recently that a few of us have started to maintain some
up-to-the-minute Node.js builder images for Docker and Openshift [1]. At
the moment, we have up to date images for Node 4,5,6 and 7. However, these
are all running on CentOS.

Recently, based on an email thread in @microservices, I started looking
into the image sizes for what we are producing, and was pretty amazed to
see ours at about 485MB. Not to be dissuaded, I decided that I would see
what effort was required to create Node.js 4,5,6 and 7 builder images on
rhel7-atomic. Without too much effort, I managed to create images based on
this that were much smaller - about 140MB. Great news!

However, this led me to a couple of questions that I would like to put
forward for discussion, and ultimately follow up with one or more issues in
https://issues.jboss.org/projects/NODE.

Based on the evidence I have seen, there is a lot of interest in a smaller
footprint for base/builder images. A rhel7-atomic builder image (not
specific to Node.js) that could be further added to by projects like ours,
would be very useful. A base builder image currently exists for RHEL,
Fedora and CentOS. These base images make downstream projects such as ours
much easier to implement because all of the OpenShift specific bits are
already taken care of (e.g. STI_SCRIPTS_URL, etc).

I was wondering if there is any current effort to produce a similar base
image for rhel7-atomic. If not, is this the kind of activity that would be
left to the community, or are there plans in the works within Red Hat to
make this happen?

I also think that, in addition to the current OpenShift offerings for
Node.js on RHEL and CentOS, we should be providing a larger matrix of
options. Is there any reason not to pursue community versions of Node.js
builder images for the following combination of OS/Node?

RHEL -> Node 4, 5, 6, 7
rhel7-atomic -> Node 4, 5, 6, 7
Fedora -> Node 4, 5, 6, 7
CentOS -> Node 4, 5, 6, 7

I understand that SCL-provided, supported images for RHEL already exist for
Node.js v4.x and soon to be Node.js v6.x. As you probably know, some of us
are actively working towards a solution that would allow these supported
images to achieve greater turnaround time, and maintain version parity with
all current Node.js releases.

Would the addition of community provided rhel7-atomic, fedora and perhaps
even rhel images be welcomed?

Lance


[1] github.com/bucharest-gold/origin-s2i-nodejs
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/container-tools/attachments/20170316/1d7de4ef/attachment.htm>