Packaging wrappers for docker based apps

[noraj]

Would it be worth it packaging docker based apps?

Until then, we choose not to package (outside docker) complex apps (often web apps) that has tons of dependencies, databases, and tons of stuff that are already available as docker containers as it would be an immense pain and impossible to maintain. So we choose to ask people just to use the available docker themselves.

What about create <package>-docker PKGBUILD with some kind of wrapper ?

Pros

• There are often lot of configuration files (.conf, .json, .env)
• Sometimes there is no docker-compose.yml but just one or several Dockerfiles and there are tons of options to a to the docker run command

Packaging all the resources needed under /usr/share and a wrapper under /bin to launch it easily could help manage all that.

Cons

When we'll start packaging a large number of dockers, port conflict issues will arise. So either 1) we choose to modify the configuration in the package so there is no conflict but that will be hard since many projects are poorly dockerized and the app or the container can't be modified to run with something else than the default port or option 2) we just leave them as it will be up to the user to change port if he needs to, which may not be a big issue since he will probably not launch 40 docker apps at the same time so port conflicts will be limited.