Hacker News Reader

Just remember to pin absolutely everything. The amount of times stuff broke or was inconsistent because one machine had a different version of the base image than the other...

View on HN

I fully agree with you. That said, one thing I've come to hate is the proliferation of version numbers in random dockerfiles and random config files all over the place. It's a pain to know what's out of date and a pain to upgrade it all. I wish there was a single tool to manage it all more simply, something like pnpm for containers plus everything you install inside them.

Nix. It's the best I've seen for this use case so far. I pin the dependencies using flakes and make container images with specific packages I need

It's not 100% perfect for managing exact versions because you update nixpkgs and many packages update as a result, but you can pretty easily pin multiple versions of it or override the version for a specific package

Nix sounds great, unfortunately I never managed to install it reliably.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com