Using Rover within Docker

[synackSA]

Hi there

I just wanted to bring up a couple of issues that I've had, where I could have saved quite some time if these things were documented in this repo and on the Apollo website: https://www.apollographql.com/docs/rover/getting-started

• Rover does not work with Docker alpine images
  • It seems like this is a known issue, but it's just not documented, https://github.com/apollographql/rover/issues/402, https://github.com/apollographql/rover/issues/375
  • I feel like this is something that should definitely be a priority fix however. alpine images are pretty much the go-to images for production deployments. Having to have switched to node:14-buster-slim image for the schema check step in my pipeline has increase the overall pipeline time but a fair bit.
• curl needs to be installed in the docker image.
  • When running the schema check command, it was failing for me with zero error message which indicated what the problem might be. I'll admit it took me way longer than it should have to finally start running the command with --log=trace, but I eventually did, I noticed that it was failing on a http request. I then made docker install the curl package when building the image and this fixed the issue.
  • So either documentation needs to indicate that curl should be installed on the system, or rover should check when doing any command that does a HTTP request (which is basically everything if you haven't set APOLLO_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1) to make sure that the curl command is available and produce a error message that indicates that curl should be installed. Long term, hopefully both.

[EverlastingBugstopper]

@synackSA we've updated the documentation to include information about the inability to run Rover on Alpine. As for your second point, I'm actually quite surprised that installing curl fixed the issue for you since Rover uses the pure Rust reqwest library for all of its HTTP requests. Installing curl is required if you are using the curl | sh installer, but it sounds like you're using npm.

If you could provide us with the logs before and after installing curl, in addition to the output of rover info that would be incredibly helpful!

~My first thought is that maybe installing curl also installes OpenSSL, which you will need to run Rover.~ Scratch that! We actually vendor OpenSSL so that you don't have to install it, Rover should have no runtime dependencies except glibc.

[synackSA]

Sorry, only seeing this now for some reason, I'll attempt to find some time soon to go over this again and provide the output.

[abernix]

@synackSA Hey! Any updates on this?

[cyberhck]

generally that might happen because of ca-certificates, you tried calling an endpoint, when you're missing ca-certificate the API call fails, when you install curl, it lists ca-certificate in it's dependencies, and certificate gets installed which results in passing endpoint call.

[MrOggy85]

Maybe related issue: I got the following error while running rover dev:

error: the router was unable to start up

The reason was that I set the environment variable: APOLLO_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 When I removed this the error did not occur and the router started as expected 🤷