Adding a Dockerfile to the TCE repo would assist automation

[jgildner-vmware]

Feature Request

The tanzu editions testing team is working automatically building changes to the TCE repo for use with our testing automation. This process could be streamlined if there were a Dockerfile in the base of the repo which builds and installs TCE in a container.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently our automation will involve building the repository and manually copying all of the executables to a container, then pushing the image to our harbor account. Having the containerization handled on the TCE side would improve consistency moving forward

Additional context

[joshrosso]

Thanks for the request @jgildner-vmware. This would likely be a great thing for release engineering or editions engineering to take on.

Do note, we do have a way to build everything within a docker container (https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/tce/blob/main/Makefile#L159-L170) but it still installs TCE into the local environment, rather than baking it into a container image.

For now, I’ll move this issue into the icebox. We’ll continue to evaluate this issue for prioritization in future milestones. In the meantime, we welcome contributions!

[dvonthenen]

Hi @jgildner-vmware

There isn't a dockerfile because we use a standard golang container to build the image. You can build TCE using a docker container by running:
make release-docker

Then after it completes, you can install from the root of the repo by running:

./build/tce-<platform>-XXXXX/install.sh

or on windows:

cd .\build\tce-windows-XXXXX
install.bat

If you want everything to be installed and then commands executed from a container, that's going to be slightly more complex as we would need to expose things like configuration on the OS to the container and also need to handle standalone clusters since it would be a docker-in-docker situation.