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A comment on Show HN: Postgres Docker image with common extensions. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Postgres Docker image with common extensions by angelico on Monday September 06, 2021 @03:19AM (#28431285)
Hi! I'm one of the contributors to the repo. Primary reason was for uniformity. Initially, we built our EC2 and DO Droplet images with Ansible and our Docker image with a Dockerfile [0]. It became tedious over time as adding a new extension meant double the work since we had to write separate instructions for Ansible and the Dockerfile. Also, the Dockerfile itself started to become long-winded and cluttered with the amount of extensions that we were pumping in.

[0]: https://github.com/supabase/postgres/blob/0c5178588791d9472c...

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Re:Show HN: Postgres Docker image with common extensions by frafra on Monday September 06, 2021 @04:08AM (#28431546)
That is a very interesting point.

As there are multiple approaches to address that issue (I use Dockerfile templates with loops for example, but I am not a fan of them), I was wondering if you considered different approaches too. In my experience, users like to have regular Dockerfile, as they are familiar with it. Would it be possible or make sense in your opinion to run Ansible inside the Dockerfile and keep a more standard approach to Docker image building?

Disclaimer: I am not familiar with Ansible.

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Re:Show HN: Postgres Docker image with common extensions by angelico on Monday September 06, 2021 @04:40AM (#28431687)
When the transition from using a Dockerfile to Ansible was done, the primary consideration was to be able to reuse as much existing instruction/ task files as possible. As such, iirc, this was the first approach taken. It fortunately became the last one as well since it worked.

For context, producing AWS EC2/ DO droplet images are more of the more important objectives of the repository. Hence, the idea of using Ansible which is used to build these images naturally became the first approach in order to consolidate everyone together.

As for running Ansible inside the Dockerfile, I have yet to try that out myself but it does sound possible since one can run Ansible on itself locally. Would have definitely considered it as the next approach to attempt if the first one failed.

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Re:Show HN: Postgres Docker image with common extensions by e12e on Monday September 06, 2021 @03:30PM (#28437092)
Interesting approach - would it not make sense to have a docker file that got the ansible playbooks, and ran ansible "on itself" to build?

Ie rather than the typical "apt install" have "ansible" in the build-part?

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