anguslees/boxfactory-perl repository overview

⁠BoxFactory

A small distro intended for assembling minimal docker images. The idea is that your docker image will contain only what is necessary and nothing more.

I was appalled that the golang-runtime docker images were hundreds of MB, for what should be essentially glibc and a mostly statically linked binary. The available alternatives were basically use scratch and do it yourself⁠ or the busybox image⁠, both of which are "too minimal" and require additional work to build on. "BoxFactory" is my solution to this. boxfactory-base is about 20MB and includes a busybox shell environment, glibc, and just enough to be able to install additional packages. No kernel, no udev, no sshd. When you need more, it's just an opkg install away.

This is a trivial use of yocto/openembedded to build docker filesystem images, and any credit should go to those projects.

⁠To Use:

FROM anguslees/boxfactory-base
RUN opkg update && opkg install apache2
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["/usr/sbin/apache2"]

⁠Images Available:

• anguslees/boxfactory-base - minimal image
• anguslees/boxfactory-python2 - base + python2.7 + pip + virtualenv
• anguslees/boxfactory-python3 - base + python3.3 + pip + virtualenv
• anguslees/boxfactory-perl - base + perl
• anguslees/boxfactory-ruby - base + ruby

If you think you have another combination that would be useful, just ask⁠ or send a github pull request.

⁠Packages Available:

To see the latest list of packages available:

docker run --rm -ti boxfactory-base
opkg update
opkg list

If there's a particular piece of software you were surprised was missing from that list, let me know.

⁠To Build:

Note this is not necessary to use boxfactory and will hasten the heat death of the universe.

git clone https://github.com/anguslees/boxfactory.git
cd boxfactory
git submodule update --init
git clone -b 1.28 git://git.openembedded.org/bitbake oe/oe-core/bitbake
cd oe
source oe-core/oe-init-build-env

At this point you can run bitbake docker-image-minimal to build the original root filesystem used in boxfactory-base, or bitbake <package name> to build a particular package. If you have lots of disk and cpu time, bitbake -k world will attempt to build every package possible (some will fail).

⁠Bugs/Questions:

Email [email protected]⁠, or file issues and pull-requests against the github project⁠