Hello, fellow Linux users!
My question is in the titel: What is a good approach to deploy docker images on a Raspberry Pi and run them?
To give you more context: The Raspberry Pi runs already an Apache server for letsencrypt and as a reverse proxy, and my home grown server should be deployed in a docker image.
To my understanding, one way to achieve this would be to push all sources over to the Raspberry Pi, build the docker image on the Raspberry Pi, give the docker image a ‘latest’ tag and use Systemd with Docker or Podman to execute the image.
My questions:
- Has anyone here had a similar problem but used a different approach to achieve this?
- Has anyone here automated this whole pipeline that in a perfect world, I just push updated sources to the Raspberry Pi, the new docker image gets build and Docker/Podman automatically pick up the new image?
- I would also be happy to be pointed at any available resources (websites/books) which explain how to do this.
At the moment I am using Raspbian 12 with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and the whole setup works with home grown servers which are simply deployed as binaries and executed via systemd. My Docker knowledge is mostly from a developer perspective, so I know nearly nothing about deploying Docker on a production machine. (Which means, if there is a super obvious way to do this I might not even be aware this way exists.)
I wouldn’t build anything significant on the RPi Zero and instead would try to build elsewhere, namely on a more powerful machine with the same architecture, or cross-build as others suggested.
That being said, what’s interesting IMHO with container image building is that you can rely on layers. So… my advice would be to find the existing image supported by your architecture then rely on it to layer on top of it. This way you only build on the RPi what is truly not available elsewhere.