It seems quite messy from a docker perspective that chef runs in most of the docker images (at least last time I tried to setup GitLab). It has been a while and I want to try to install again; last time I got caught debugging chef and couldn’t find anyone online with the same errors. Strange because I was using the latest official GitLab docker images, latest version of docker, etc…
My question is: are there any plans to have GitLab docker images that are devoid of chef? It would make myself (and, I would think, many other devs) feel more confident about running your docker images.
GitLab uses Omnibus for making the whole component installation and upgrade a breeze. The equivalent process is used for building Docker images based on this framework. Currently there are no plans to replace Omnibus with something else (if existing).
If you don’t want to have Omnibus in your Docker images, you could still build your own images with a source installation. It may not be reasonable though in terms of updates, maintenance and support questions.
It just doesn’t make sense to me to run chef in Docker… I’ve never heard of such a thing. You could run chef to build docker containers to distribute, run chef in docker to test out your cookbooks… But distributing a bunch of docker images that all run chef seems messy. And it sucks trying to Google the error messages when they don’t boot. Why are we scrolling through someone else’s chef code? The whole point of baking Docker images is for cleanliness…
Ok I thought it was just me. I’m sitting here trying to spin up Gitlab from the Docker images. I’m having a hell of a time getting it to work. When I saw Chef cookbooks, I was shocked. Why the hell would Chef be embedded inside the container? It’s been almost 5 mins and the container still isn’t fully running. This is nuts.