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Repository: govuk-ruby-images

Base container images for GOV.UK Ruby apps

GitHub
govuk-ruby-images
Ownership
#govuk-platform-engineering
Category
Utilities

README

What’s in this repo

The govuk-ruby-images repository defines OCI container images for building and running production Ruby applications on Kubernetes.

  • govuk-ruby-base is a base image for production application containers; it provides:

    • a Ruby runtime that can run as an unprivileged user with a read-only filesystem
    • database client libraries
    • a Node.js runtime

  • govuk-ruby-builder is for building application container images; it provides the same as govuk-ruby-base plus:

    • a C/C++ toolchain and various build tools and utilities
    • Yarn, for building/installing Node.js package dependencies
    • configuration to speed up and optimise building Ruby applications

Usage

Use the two images in your app’s Dockerfile:

ARG ruby_version=3.3
ARG base_image=ghcr.io/alphagov/govuk-ruby-base:$ruby_version
ARG builder_image=ghcr.io/alphagov/govuk-ruby-builder:$ruby_version


FROM $builder_image AS builder


your build steps here
FROM $base_image


your app image steps here

See alphagov/frontend/Dockerfile for a full, real-world example.

Common problems and resolutions

ERROR: failed to solve: cannot copy to non-directory: /var/lib/docker/overlay2/.../merged/app/tmp

Add tmp/ to your .dockerignore. This is necessary because we symlink $APP_HOME/tmp to /tmp as a workaround for some badly-behaved gems that assume they can write to Path.join(Rails.root, 'tmp') so that we can run with readOnlyRootFilesystem.

Add or update a Ruby version

The file build-matrix.json defines the Ruby versions and image tags that we build.

The checksum field is currently the SHA-256 hash of the Ruby source tarball. We verify this in the build.

See Ruby Releases for the list of available Ruby tarballs and their SHA digests.

Team

GOV.UK Platform Engineering team looks after this repo. If you’re inside GDS, you can find us in #govuk-platform-engineering or view our kanban board.