This tool can be used to convert a Docker image to an executable that you can send to your friends!
Download a binary from the releases page.
$ mv docker2exe-darwin-amd64 docker2exe
$ chmod +x docker2exe
$ ./docker2exe --help
To create a new binary:
$ docker2exe --name alpine --image alpine:3.9
This will create the following files:
dist
├── alpine-darwin-amd64
├── alpine-linux-amd64
├── alpine-windows-amd64
Now, you can run the executable:
$ dist/alpine-darwin-amd64 cat /etc/alpine-release
3.9.5
When the executable is run, we'll check for the alpine:3.9.5 image on the user's system. If it doesn't exist, the executable will automatically run:
$ docker pull alpine:3.9.5
In this mode, if the specified image doesn't exist, we'll attempt to load it from a tarball that is embeddded in the executable.
$ docker2exe --name alpine --image alpine:3.9 --embed
When creating the executable above, the image was dumped to a tarball and baked into the resulting executable:
$ docker save alpine:3.9 | gzip > alpine.tar.gz
When the executable runs, we'll check for the alpine:3.9 image on the user's system. If it doesn't exist, the executable will automatically run:
$ docker load alpine.tar.gz
For small images, this approach works great. In the example above, the resulting executable was under 10MB.