Discussion about possible Kanto feature "Create container from local image file"

[LudwigWeise]

I have a question/proposal for a feature of Kanto in the area of Kanto deployment:

Usually in the deployment descriptor files (json) there is this URL, telling from which container-registry the container should be downloaded i.e. "ghcr.io/eclipse-leda/leda-contrib-self-update-agent/self-update-agent:build-172"

     "container_name": "self-update-agent",
     "image": {
          "name": "ghcr.io/eclipse-leda/leda-contrib-self-update-agent/self-update-agent:build-172"
     },

We would love to have a feature that allows to set a "path-to-local-folder-with-container-image" instead of the url to the container-registry. So in the example above replacing "ghcr.io/eclipse-leda/leda-contrib-self-update-agent/self-update-agent:build-172" by "/etc/container-management/containers/self-update-agent-image-file.tar".

Background is: we want to provide some basic containers (i.e. VUM, CUA and SUA) as part of the distro-image, in order to be able to install these containers, even if we are not connected to internet.

[ttttodorov]

Hi @LudwigWeise,
We will make an analysis of the feature request and eventually consider it for the Eclipse Kanto M5 release, which is planned for end of November 2023.

[stoyan-zoubev]

I think such functionally may be implemented as an extension to the currently available deployment service within the container management.
Additionally to the directory with container descriptors, the user can provide a directory with container images as tar.gz files. Upon start, this deployment service will first process this new directory and import any container images into the container runtime (containerd) image cache. Then the processing of container descriptors will follow as it is now.
Perhaps some internal APIs need to be modified so that image imports can be done.

But in general, I agree that proper analysis shall be done first and Eclipse Kanto M5 release seems realistic to me.