Can Discourse ship frequent Docker images that do not need to be bootstrapped?

First off, in reading this thread, the first thing that strikes me is the patience and helpfulness of @sam and his team. You all have built some amazing software here and we all owe you a big thank you. Double-thanks for making the project open-source.

Sam et. al. definitely have the right to build their project out as they see fit; I can also understand the perspective of those (myself included) who see the Docker image boostrapping used by Discourse to be not consistent with many similar software packages in the container ecosystem. In particular, using a launcher script from the command line is not how most/all orchestration tools work, at least in my limited expeirence.

I think the answer here is for the broader user community to accept the architectural decision made by the maintainers, but work to generate an “alternative” base image that captures common use cases. As Matt points out, there’s no way you can do everything with an omnibus image, but we probably can get to a point where those of us who prefer a “single” base image can keep up with the mainline offering.

I’ve taken the initiative to follow Sam’s recommendation to pull the “knowledge” from the base image and have created a fork of the project @pierreozoux mentions above to make a slightly leaner base image. I’m actively committing to https://github.com/BradJonesLLC/docker-discourse so take a look and let me know what you think.

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