Auto-detect base image to use if no Dockerfile is found

[sr229]

Summary

In layman's terms: It should be able to allow developers to git push to a gitkube-enabled cluster without a Dockerfile - or so called the "Heroku-style" deployment.

Intro

Heroku's architecture is composed of a dedicated builder for the source, where your project requires a Procfile to determine processes to execute, and a declarative app manifest that includes all the required dependencies and postinstall scripts that the builder will run.

Heroku builds an app using an approach called a Stack-Buildpack approach, whereas:

• use a Base image that has all the dev dependencies.
• use a Buildpack: a set of shell scripts that would automate the building and releasing of the code
• trim dev dependencies from the container and release to the runtime environment.

But in the case for gitkube, we do not need to implement the same flow as Heroku since we can take advantage of the rich Docker ecosystem in Kubernetes.

Process flow

Once the remote recieves the source from the push, it should be able to detect the dockerfile and the manifest, but we should look on two situations:

• Situation 1: Dockerfile found and manifest found.
  • Use the current flow to dpeloy app.
• Situation 2: Dockerfile not found but manifest found
  • Try to find manifest (package.json, pom.xml, etc.).
  • Grab image that works for the specific app (package.json is found for example, then use nodejs:latest)
  • then run npm install, and deploy app.
  • run code using npm start or find app.js, index.js, etc.
    • if not found, declare an error and call a back off.

Conclusion

This is not intended to replace how gitkube currently works, rather, it is a enhancement on the current flow, and it allows migrating users from Heroku to their own provisioned Kubernetes cluster.

Feel free to extend this as well, as I only accounted for cases on migrating users from heroku.

[blopker]

Dokku uses https://github.com/gliderlabs/herokuish to run the build packs. Could be an interesting combination with this project.