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by cpuguy83
820 days ago
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docker build is backed by buildkit, which is available as a grpc service ("docker build" is a grpc client/server). Buildkit operates on "LLB", which would be equivalent to llvm IR.
Dockerfile is a frontend.
Buildkit has the Dockerfile frontend built in, but you can use your own frontend as well. If you ever see "syntax=docker/dockerfile:1.6", as an example, this triggers buildkit to fire up a container with that image and uses that as the front end instead of the builtin Dockerfile frontend.
Docker doesn't actually care what the format is. Alternatively, you can access the same frontend api's from a client (which, technically, a frontend is just a client). Frontends generate LLB which gets sent to the solver to execute. |
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Applying this information to the topic at hand:
Given what Buildkit actually does, I bet someone could create a compiler that does a decent job transforming nix "derivations", the underlying declarative format that the nix daemon uses to run builds, into these declarative Buildkit protobuf objects and run nix builds on Buildkit instead of the nix daemon. To make this concrete, we would be converting from something that looked like this: https://gist.github.com/clhodapp/5d378e452d1c4993a5e35cd043d.... So basically, run "bash" with those args and environment variables, with those derivations show below already built and their outputs made visible.
Once that exists, it should also be possible to create a frontend that consumes a list of nix "installables" (how you refer to specific concrete packages) and produces an oci image out of the nix package repository, without relying on the nix builder to actually run any of it.
This would subsume the purpose of e.g. https://nixery.dev/