docker2exe

This tool can be used to convert a Docker image to an executable that you can send to your friends!

Installation

Download a binary from the releases page.

$ mv docker2exe-darwin-amd64 docker2exe
$ chmod +x docker2exe
$ ./docker2exe --help

Usage

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

Embedded Mode

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.