Cannot build project with c files with hexpm docker images

I will try to recreate the setup tomorrow and come back to you.

Do you have a demo or an example of this happening? I will take a dive into the build tooling and see if I need to fix a bug or document the build requirements better.

The zig build system is very promising, in theory it should solve all these problems for c/zig files with minimal effort, namely creating a zig build file. I will attempt soon to make a elixir library that integrates this, and hopefully we will forget about make, cmake, automake forever.

Welcome to “modern” computing, where a C/C++ build toolchain is still (a) required and (b) extremely difficult to have in a deterministic manner.

That’s why people push for Zig and Rust to become the baseline tools instead. Sadly it’s taking a while.

I am not building a docker image that will be used in production, this is the CI stage that executes commands like: mix test, mix credo, mix dialyzer. All what needs to be done at this stage is compile the project and execute the command.

Nor do I, the whole idea of using these images is the fact that you have the elixir and OTP with a specific version, creating custom images would defeat the entire propose of using images from hexpm.

I will just say the same thing that was marked as the correct answer, the build system for files that compile to native code is a big mess and there is absolutely no guarantee that even if build-essentials were to be installed on the docker images, it would work for majority of the projects that contain NIFs.

I would install build-essentials, compile my stuff, then just copy the output of the compilation in another Docker stage. That’s why we have multi-stage Dockerfiles.

(Or you begin with a more dev/build friendly image and just copy stuff to the minimal hexpm container. That might be an even better idea actually.)

I wouldn’t want to reinvent the minimal images already provided. But if you’re feeling brave and independent, you can always make your own minimal image stepping on e.g. distroless or alpine/wolfie. I personally wouldn’t.

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.

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.

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.

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