Should we publish our own images?

[jacobwoffenden]

My current thought is to publish our own base image (ghcr.io/ministryofjustice/devcontainer-base) which is an extension of (mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:ubuntu), adding a utility script which includes functions for:

• logging
• getting system architecture
• retrieving the latest tag of a GitHub repository
• installing system packages with apt
• installing Python packages with pip

Most/if not all of the features available from devcontainers/features include similar functions for:

• getting the user
• getting the distribution
• getting the architecture
• getting versions
• installing packages

That is a lot of places to maintain the same set of functions

However, if ship our own base image and write features utilising the utility script, that means our features aren't universal and have a dependency on a particular base image

Alternatively we could maintain the script in this repo and bundle as part of building/publishing features

🤔

[jacobwoffenden]

Additionally, with a base image, would we use CalVer (like Cloudflare does with cloudflared) or is SemVer fine?

[jacobwoffenden]

I've published a base image using SemVer

Source: https://github.com/ministryofjustice/.devcontainer/tree/main/images/base
Artefact: https://github.com/ministryofjustice/.devcontainer/pkgs/container/devcontainer-base