Pre-fetch docker images onto the Vagrant box

[olberger]

In my tests with (relatively slow) network (ADSL), the fetching of images is the main bottleneck to UX.

I guess it should be feasable to not rely on a generic Vagrant box, but instead create a dedicated box including the pre-fetched Docker images.

Hth,

[smk4664]

It is fairly easy pre-fetching images, but then we have to keep them up to date. The vagrant boxes need to be built using the system it is to be installed on. So a libvirt box requires to be built in libvirt, VirtualBox boxes require being built within VirtualBox.

[smk4664]

@olberger I have been thinking on this, I think a solution could be to offer the option to load the images from a local directory. This way, if you find yourself repeatedly starting fresh with vagrant, you could save the images using docker save, and then load them from the local directory. This way we don't have to build a new box every time an image is updated, and the boxes can stay relatively small.

[Mierdin]

So, a few things that might impact this discussion:

• MP3 is hopefully going to drastically cut down on image size across the board.
• If users are frequently rebuilding their Vagrant environments, it might be better to fix that than to add on the complexity of saving images locally

Just my $0.02

[olberger]

I've been looking for some hints on that issue, and found https://github.com/jlk/docker-registry-cache

It looks fairly old, but maybe that could be handy. Just in order to keep a note somewhere. Will report if I'm testing such options.