How to add chrome and chrome driver to run image

[raghu-sannlingappa]

I am trying to build a springboot application with selenium. For this I need to add chrome and chrome driver to run image. Is there a clear documentation on how to extend the run image with additional capabilities? Can anybody guide me what is the best practice solution to achieve this.

[dmikusa]

You may not need to extend the run image. The apt buildpack will let you install additional dep packages (from a repo or from deb files you direct it to).

https://github.com/dmikusa/apt-buildpack

It does not, because buildpacks don't run as root, install them into the typical places, but it will include them in your container and modify environment variables like PATH such that things find the tools that were installed. This works 80% of the time, so it's worth giving it a shot to see if you can install what you need this way.

If that doesn't work, you can modify the run image. The biggest drawback of this is that you need to keep it up-to-date, which means you need some sort of CI running to update it when there are changes.

You can pick one of the Paketo stack images, fork that repo and start making changes. That would provide you with CI that you can run to publish your new stacks. It will publish both a build & run image, although you may only need the run image.

The other option would be to roll your own CI and a Dockerfile that extends from the Paketo run image. You can add a layer on top of it that adds the additional dependencies that you need. Just be careful to not disrupt the metadata that is added, as there is some metadata on the container image that is needed for buildpacks to work.

In the end, when you have your custom run image, you can use the pack build --run-image flag to specify your custom run image. That is what pack will then use as the base image for the resulting app image that is built.

Hope that helps!