I’m a bit interested in starting to look at a docker plugin (https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/2648) as a POC. Probably more work than I would finish in a sensible amount of time, but think it would be fun, none the less.

That'd be great, thank you Andreas for taking initiative with one of the most requested features! We have the backend/experimental folder to allow development of things like this with lots of flexibility to change the design as you go. You can more easily add incremental things that way. I suspect a great first step is to get Pants to build a Dockerfile for you. Use BinaryPaths to discover Docker, define a docker target type, and run the right docker commands to build. See https://github.com/compyman/pants-docker for possible inspiration, cc @average-australia-85137

Awesome. Thanks. Also reading up a bit on what they’ve done with the bazel docker rules https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker gives a few ideas. So, yes, managing images and building Dockerfiles is a good start.

I liked Nate's use of "unions" to make it extensible for certain dependencies to be pre-processed. That's great that it's a plugin hook for future users

great to be able to draw on as many experiences as possible from earlier work 👍 extensibility is great 🙂

Yeah, this has only waited on needing someone with a use-case to actually do it.

good progress so far: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/12363#issuecomment-881629592

Hi! I'm the person who wrote that original plugin up there! (just got back from vacation!) which is working pretty well for my company! I'm available here if you want to chat!

OK, I think we’ve got enough features to review in one PR.. https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/12363

Only the reference section comes from source code