buildkit

Ok, where was I? In the last blog post (BuildKit Dockerfile Frontend) scratching the surface by introcuding here-docs in Dockerfiles. The original inspiration for the post - series, as it turned out - was my to cut the cristiangreco/docker-pdflatex image down by a GB or so.
I went from this:

COPY install.sh /install.sh
RUN sh /install.sh && rm /install.sh

to this:

RUN <<eot bash
  apt-get update
  apt-cache depends texlive-full \
  | grep "Depends:" \
  | grep -v "doc$" \
  | egrep -v "texlive-(games|music)" \
  | egrep -v "texlive-lang-(arabic|cjk|chinese|cyrillic|czechslovak|european|french|german|greek|italian|japanese|korean|other|polish|portuguese|spanish)$" \
  | cut -d ' ' -f 4 \
  | xargs apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y
  apt-get autoremove
eot

I am a big fan of pandoc to generate documents instead of using a binary format like MS Word. Feels more natural to have a source and compile it into a delivarable.

Dockerfile Improvement

Installing LaTex and all the dependencies for pandoc is a hassle and the natural way of dealing with that is (of course) to create a container. I found the container cristiangreco/docker-pdflatex on the interweb.

But the image was rather big (4.4GB) and I thought:

Let's see if we can shave of a GB or so and while we are at it make the Dockerfile more readable