How do you distribute OCaml docker containers?

Learning
1

Curious how people build and distribute their OCaml apps

For example, do you
include the source code (like FrameworkBenchmarks/opium.dockerfile at master · TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks · GitHub)

  • copy the source code
  • build
  • distribute the resulting image

or do you use delete the source code?

or do you do something like this FrameworkBenchmarks/aspcore-mvc-dap-pg-up.dockerfile at master · TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks · GitHub :

  • copy the source code to one image
  • build
  • copy the build to another image
    to both not distribute the source code and keep the image as small as possible?
2

I’m not distributing anything publicly with Docker images, but for internal work projects we use the second approach. First a build stage, then copy the compiled binary + any runtime dependencies to a more minimal runtime image. Multistage builds thankfully make this pretty straightforward, as shown in the example you linked to.

That said, including the a complete suite of build and development dependencies in an image can be very helpful to share a consistent build environment with other developers or across systems.

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3

The last option for our work with ocaml-ci see ocaml-ci/Dockerfile at master · ocurrent/ocaml-ci · GitHub and GitHub - ocurrent/ocaml-ci: A CI for OCaml projects

In Dockerfile:

  1. Lines 1 - 34 do the setup, copy and building
  2. Lines 34 - 55 produce an image
  3. That image gets uploaded to hub.docker.com as Docker Hub
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