vitess-gh/docker/README.md

Vitess Docker Images

The Vitess Project publishes several Docker images in the Docker Hub "vitess" repository. This file describes the purpose of the different images.

TL;DR: Use the vitess/lite image for running Vitess. Our Kubernetes Tutorial uses it as well. Instead of using the latest tag, you can pin it to a known stable version e.g. v4.0.

Principles

The structure of this directory and our Dockerfile files is guided by the following principles:

• The configuration of each Vitess image is in the directory docker/<image>/.
• Configurations for other images e.g. our internal tool Keytar (see below), can be in a different location.
• Images with more complex build steps have a build.sh script e.g. see lite/build.sh.
• Tags are used to provide (stable) versions e.g. see tag v2.0 for the image vitess/lite.
• Where applicable, we provide a latest tag to reference the latest build of an image.

Images

Our list of images can be grouped into:

• published Vitess code
• dependencies for our Kubernetes tutorial
• internally used tools

Vitess

Image	How (When) Updated	Description
bootstrap	manual (after incompatible changes are made to bootstrap.sh or vendor/vendor.json	Basis for all Vitess images. It is a snapshot of the checked out repository after running ./bootstrap.sh. Used to cache dependencies. Avoids lengthy recompilation of dependencies if they did not change. Our internal test runner test.go uses it to test the code against different MySQL versions.
base	automatic (after every GitHub push to the master branch)	Contains all Vitess server binaries. Snapshot after running make build.
root	automatic (after every GitHub push to the master branch)	Same as base but with the default user set to "root". Required for Kubernetes.
lite	manual (updated with every Vitess release)	Stripped down version of base e.g. source code and build dependencies are removed. Default image in our Kubernetes templates for minimized startup time.

All these Vitess images include a specific MySQL/MariaDB version ("flavor").

• We provide Dockerfile files for multiple flavors (Dockerfile.<flavor>).
• On Docker Hub we publish only images with MySQL 5.7 to minimize maintenance overhead and avoid confusion.

If you are looking for a stable version of Vitess, use the lite image with a fixed version. If you are looking for the latest Vitess code in binary form, use the "latest" tag of the base image.