Cannot build project with c files with hexpm docker images

No, they contain the minimal code required to have erlang and elixir run on top of their base OS images. They don’t contain build tooling by design.

There seems to be some difference between docker images hosted in elixir dockerhub repo and hexpm ones. I only started to get this problem after switching to hexpm.

Yes. The elixir ones started as community contributions and are now maintained by the EEF, the hexpm ones are build by hex bob automation.

But really you don’t want build tooling in docker images, which are meant to run in production and that’s what the hexpm ones are for. You can use them in CI and install build tools manually or build on top of them / use other images, which come with build tools installed. I however don’t think build tools installed is a good default for docker images.

I’m not sure what would be the benefit of running images with elixir and erlang preinstalled instead of a release. Even if you take a look at Dockerfile generated by phoenix with phx.gen.release, the hexpm image is just used for building the project.

You’d be surpised how often people don’t run releases, even if it’s not best practise.

Also even if you include built tools. Where do you start, where do you stop. hexpm build for multiple OSes, so using the os default will yield different results. Using a custom subset also needs (additional) maintenance across OSes. Now make might sound simple, but then people might want to compile rustler dependencies and need rust/cargo, …. I personally find it cleaner to just add erlang/elixir to the base images and leave the rest to the users, who actually knows what they need.

Makes sense, I think the system for compilation of native files is kind of a workaround currently and could be improved greatly.

Yeah, I’d love to see zig being adopted more to compile NIFs.

Yeah, we’ve talked before about this here.

I am planning to participate with this idea on an upcoming hackaton (can’t remember the name, something overflow), basically using the same approach tailwind is using currently with a mix of the options provided by burrito.

I saw mention of exqlite and thought I introduced a bug. But for exqlite to work with your base image you will need to apt-get install dependencies. There are precompiled binaries already with the release so it shouldn’t be necessary.

This is strange, because it always compiles from source, is there some special option that needs to be passed?

I am using it from the dependency ecto_sqlite3.