Suggestion: add a skip-images option to app-update-module

General Discussions
1

SUGGESTION: Add a skip-images option to the app-update-module scripts

Unfortunately for now, if I want to use the app-update-module to update a docker-compose application, the images are by default included in the artifact.
My problem is that the images I am using are fairly big (in size), and it would be very ineffective to include them in the artifact (planing to build artifacts in CI/CD). Instead, I would like docker compose to handle the pulling of images directly from the target device.

Create Mender Artifacts

It would be nice to have something like this as a generation command:

app-gen --artifact-name "$ARTIFACT_NAME-$TAG" \
	--device-type "raspberrypi-cm3" \
	--platform "$PLATFORM" \
	--application-name "$ARTIFACT_NAME" \
	--orchestrator docker-compose \
	--manifests-dir ./manifests \
	--output-path "$ARTIFACT_NAME-$TAG".mender \
	--skip-images \
	-- \
	sign \
	--software-filesystem data-partition \
	--software-name="$ARTIFACT_NAME" \
	--software-version="$TAG" \
	-k "$MENDER_KEY_PATH"

Note the --skip-images option.

Would it be possible to come with a feature like this?

Best regards

2

Hello @DamKast ,

That makes sense to have, especially for testing and in environments with very stable network.

Just note that I have seen many reports that the registry fetching tools (docker pull, etc.) work very poorly when network is unreliable. E.g. they can simply hang, there is no timeout, no resume, etc. There can also be issues with firewalls.

So the robust way to do this is to package images into the Artifact and then use delta updates to reduce the size.