Andrew Lock | .NET Escapades Andrew Lock
In this post, I'm not going to talk about ASP.NET Core for a change. Instead, I'm going to show one way to package CLI tools and their dependencies as Docker images. With a simple helper script, this allows you to run a CLI tool without having to install the dependencies on your host machine. I'll show how to create a Docker image containing your favourite CLI tool, and a helper script for invoking it.
All the commands in this post describe using Linux containers. The same principal can be applied to Windows containers if you update the commands. However the benefits of isolating your environment come with the downside of large Docker image sizes.
If you're looking for a Dockerised version of the AWS CLI specifically, I have an image on Docker hub which is generated from this GitHub repository.
For example, take the AWS CLI. The suggested way to install the CLI on Linux is to use Python and pip (Pip is the package installer for Python; the equivalent of NuGet for .NET). The recommended version to use is Python 3, but you may have other apps that require Python 2, at which point you're in a world of dependency hell.
