Adding Racket to Netlify Build Image

[smizell]

This isn't an issue, just informational :)

I've been playing with Pollen lately and wanted to automate deployments to Netlify. Unfortunately, Netlify doesn't support Racket out of the box. I borrowed some of the Dockerfile from here to open a PR to see if they'll add it.

netlify/build-image#381

Thanks for putting this Docker stuff together! I appreciate it.

[jackfirth]

Oh cool! I hadn't heard of Netlify, I'm glad you were able to get Racket working for it. And thanks for the appreciation 🙂.

Skimming the Netlify docs, do they maintain a single shared Docker image with every common frontend toolchain installed? That's interesting, I would have expected them to let you specify an arbitrary custom image that you want to build your site with.

[smizell]

Yeah, they have a single image here. It installs Ruby, Python, Node, and a few others along with Hugo as a static site tool. They then have a build script they run that will do various things out of the box on build. It will look for Gemfiles for Ruby or Python files and install all dependencies.

This lets you drop your static site tool into dependencies and give them a run command. They'll install dependencies on build and run your command afterwards.

No telling how big the image is though!

I would have expected them to let you specify an arbitrary custom image that you want to build your site with.

Agreed. I'd be curious why. Maybe they feel that CI/CD services can already do that, and you can use the Netlify command to push up the build afterwards. I've actually been tinkering with this myself since they don't have Racket support. I'm not a Docker expert so it's definitely a journey. :)