Best Practice: Build in docker container or COPY?

[mmmoli]

Hi there,

I’m working on a project where I use NX to manage a monorepo with a Remix app (web) and a library (design-system) that it depends on. I'm deploying the app using Docker and hosting it on Fly.io, and I’ve been exploring the best way to handle the build process for this setup.

Context

Monorepo Structure:

• apps/web: The main Remix app.
• libs/design-system: A shared library that web depends on.

Build Process: The app needs to be built with the library’s code included, so both the app and its dependencies are fully compiled within the container.

The main challenge I've come-up against, while create a Docker build process is Dependency Management: Ensuring that web has access to the latest build of design-system within the Docker container.

What I've Tried:

1. Building Locally and Copying Artifacts: Attempted building the app locally and copying the build output into the Docker container. However, dependencies for design-system were missing when I ran the container and I was worried about how particular binaries might work.

2. Multi-Stage Docker Builds: Bringing the entire workspace into the container and using nx commands to build and run the app. This felt bloated and the build step of the Remix app failed.

Questions

• Have I been barking-up the wrong tree?
• What's the best practice here?

When I find an answer, I'll publish an example repo so nx neebies like me can learn too.

[yanniznik]

@mmmoli same question, have you figured out a proper way to do this?

[mmmoli]

Unfortunately no. I gave up and moved away from a docker set up.

Best thing I found was PNPM deploy. I was playing with different package managers but deploy really changed things.

If you run it, it creates a directory with only the dependencies that app needs.

You can then copy that into docker and build from there.

Pretty neat.

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In case you're interested, I'm running the same stack of Cloudflare workers now and I absolutely love the set up. Can't recommend it enough.