Images, the comic

A recipe book for every station.

The same kitchen as the other comics. Every cook sets up their station from a recipe book: an image. Books come from a shop, get new editions, and pile up on the shelf if nobody clears them out.

1 The recipe book

An image is the recipe book a cook sets up their station from. Every container starts from one, and many cooks can work from the same book.

You get a book from the shop, Docker Hub, page by page: every layer with a progress bar of its own. Pages you already have from another book are not fetched again.

See what every page costs, and where the weight comes from: the size of each layer.

2 A new edition

Now and then the app asks the shop, and marks a book when a newer edition is out.

A new edition does nothing by itself: cooks keep cooking from the old one until their station is set up again. The app shows who still has the old book, and renews a whole compose dinner at once, only what changed.

Or let it happen by itself: at a time you choose, the new edition is tried, and if the dish does not come out right within five minutes, the old book goes back. A dinner on a compose card is left alone: the card is the truth there.

3 Your own recipes

Write your own book from a folder with a Dockerfile, the house recipe, and watch the pages come out as it happens: the build output.

Put a label on the cover: a tag, like 1.2 or latest. Add one, or take one off.

Send your book to the shop, so other kitchens can get it too: push. The app asks first, and so does taking a tag off.

4 Between kitchens

Some shops are for members only. The app uses the card you already showed there once: the credentials you stored with docker login.

Take a book to another kitchen: save it as a file and read it in over there, or copy it to the other machine straight from the comparison of the two.

Hire a cook straight from a book: run a container from an image, and choose which hatch they work at and what they are called there, its network and alias.

5 Clearing the shelf

Old editions without a cover pile up: untagged images. Once a week the app clears them away, with the scraps left over from building, but never a book with a label, and never a pantry.

And the dashboard says which books take up the most shelf, and what is safe to clear out.

In Docker Client MX: the Images page, with every layer in view, and every new edition brought along to the cooks.

The cheat sheet

Every picture above, in Docker words.

A recipe book: An image
The shop: A registry, such as Docker Hub
The pages of a book: Layers
The weight of a page: The size of a layer
A new edition: A newer version of the image
Setting up the station again: Recreating a container on the new image
Trying the new edition at night: Updating by itself, with rollback
The house recipe: A Dockerfile
Writing your own book: Build
A label on the cover: A tag
Sending it to the shop: Push
A members-only shop: A private registry, with docker login
A book without a cover: An untagged image

Now read your own recipe books.

Pull with every layer in view, see when a newer version is out, bring the containers along, and build, tag and push without leaving the window.

What the app does with images →Containers, the comic →Download for Windows