Docker build seems to overweighted and not performant for storage/build

[gif30]

What problem are you trying to solve?

Im in love with this proyect, seems it fixed a problem i didn't know i had but is one of the best solutions I've found. The only problem i've found is trying to use this for pipelines and oci containers. They are veeeeery slow to generate, even when i dont have that many packages, and they are very bulky

What solution would you like?

i dont know how to reduce the size, but i would love it to at least be more efficient when building and rehusing cache. so i've found a similar proyect that is called flox, which seems better at doing this. instead of generating a single docker layer, it generates one layer per package, that in many cases helps a lot when reinstalling and pushing to regisitries, because it has the same hash layer. Also it can therefore also skip reinstalling packages with the same previos version. Flox attempts to solve same issues as here, but the usability of devbox and the similarity to node packages.json is much more readeable and efficient to write and to help new users to be confortable with devbox. what do you think?

Alternatives you've considered

No response

[mikeland73]

Triage: looks hard, p3.

This is a reasonable feature request, but it isn't a small change. devbox generate dockerfile produces a Dockerfile that installs every package through a single devbox install step inside the image. As a result, the whole Nix closure lands in one layer, and any package change invalidates it.

Getting per-package layers (as Flox and nix2container/dockerTools.buildLayeredImage do) would mean building the image from Nix store paths rather than a Dockerfile RUN step. For example, devbox could:

• generate a Nix expression using dockerTools.streamLayeredImage / nix2container over the devbox profile's closure, or
• split the install into one layer per top-level package with shared dependencies deduplicated.

Either way this is a new build path, with implications for plugins, init hooks and multi-arch builds, so it's non-trivial.

Nothing to reproduce here; I'm assessing from how the generated Dockerfile works.

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