Modus: a Datalog dialect for building container images

Chris Tomy, Tingmao Wang, Earl T. Barr, Sergey Mechtaev

Abstract

Containers help share and deploy software by packaging it with all its dependencies. Tools, like Docker or Kubernetes, spawn containers from images as specified by a build system’s language, such as Dockerfile. A build system takes many parameters to build an image, including OS and application versions. These build parameters can interact: setting one can restrict another. Dockerfile lacks support for reifying and constraining these interactions, thus forcing developers to write a build script per workflow. As a result, developers have resorted to creating ad-hoc solutions such as templates or domain-specific frameworks that harm performance and complicate maintenance because they are verbose and mix languages.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Tomy-al:FSE22,
  author    = {Chris Tomy and
               Tingmao Wang and
               Earl T. Barr and
               Sergey Mechtaev},
  title     = {Modus: a Datalog dialect for building container images},
  booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
  pages     = {595--606},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2022},
}

Modus: a Datalog dialect for building container images

Abstract

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