docker2exe

docker2exe

This tool can be used to convert a Docker image to an executable that you can send to your friends!

Installation

Download a binary from the releases page.

$ mv docker2exe-darwin-amd64 docker2exe
$ chmod +x docker2exe
$ ./docker2exe --help

Requirements on the building device

Docker, GoLang and gzip are also required. Use your package manager to install them.

Requirements on the executing device

Docker is required.

Usage

To create a new binary:

$ docker2exe --name alpine --image alpine:3.9

This will create the following files:

dist
├── alpine-darwin-amd64
├── alpine-linux-amd64
├── alpine-windows-amd64

Now, you can run the executable:

$ dist/alpine-darwin-amd64 cat /etc/alpine-release
3.9.5

When the executable is run, we'll check for the alpine:3.9.5 image on the user's system. If it doesn't exist, the executable will automatically run:

$ docker pull alpine:3.9.5

Embedded Mode

In this mode, if the specified image doesn't exist, we'll attempt to load it from a tarball that is embeddded in the executable.

$ docker2exe --name alpine --image alpine:3.9 --embed

When creating the executable above, the image was dumped to a tarball and baked into the resulting executable:

$ docker save alpine:3.9 | gzip > alpine.tar.gz

When the executable runs, we'll check for the alpine:3.9 image on the user's system. If it doesn't exist, the executable will automatically run:

$ docker load alpine.tar.gz

For small images, this approach works great. In the example above, the resulting executable was under 10MB.