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Container Layer Analyzer

Backend unit tests Frontend unit tests Build the container image

Have you ever wondered what exactly is eating up your precious space in each layer of your container images? Or what changed between a rebuild of your container image? Would you like to have a nice visualization of the file system similarly to what Baobab provides?

In that case this is the tool you are looking for: it provides a simple web UI that shows you the size of your file system inside any container image that can be pulled from a registry or imported from a local archive:

single_image

Additionally, it allows you to save an image into a backend database and compare it to any other layer from any other image:

image_comparison

The colors in the comparison graph have the following meaning:

  • green: this folder or file is smaller than in the other image
  • red: this folder or file is larger than in the other image
  • yellow: this folder or file has the same size
  • blue: this folder or file is only present in this image

Additionally, clicking on a folder or file in the sunburst graph will focus the same folder or file in the compared image:

screencast

Run it

The application is available as two containers from ghcr.io. You can fetch and run them on your local machine via:

❯ podman run -d -p 4040:4040 ghcr.io/dcermak/container-layer-sizes-backend:latest
d9d67a66d4ce3473c646440b966e7d2a1b3d8c56e013b5eab985c53631ca5abd
❯ podman run -d --rm -p 5050:5050 ghcr.io/dcermak/container-layer-sizes:latest
6537a951423aeee3c6559e5dd8b76011ec8148023b43be4edf1ce09fe2c2dce3

Then open localhost:5050 in your browser and give it a spin.

Build it directly on your machine

To build the analyzer on your machine, you'll need the following tools:

  • podman configured to work in rootless mode
  • node.js and yarn
  • golang
  • the prerequisites to build github.com/containers/image (see here)

When you have these tools set up, clone the repository and run:

❯ git clone https://github.com/dcermak/container-layer-sizes.git
❯ cd container-layer-sizes
❯ yarn install
❯ yarn run build
❯ go run ./bin/storage &
Ready. Listening on :4040
❯ go run ./bin/analyzer
Ready. Listening on :5050

The web UI is then accessible on localhost:5050.

Build it with Docker or Buildah

You can build the container image that is available on ghcr.io locally as well via docker or buildah:

$ docker build .
$ buildah bud --layers .

What is missing?

  • proper documentation
  • better tests
  • actual error handling and better feedback via the UI
  • performance improvements

How does this work?

The go binary is a simple web server that serves the frontend code and analyzes the container sizes. The size analysis works as follows:

  1. The requested container image is pulled from a registry into the local container storage (i.e. the equivalent of podman pull). The image is then converted into an oci archive and extracted into a temporary directory. This gives us each layer as an archive.

  2. Each layer is analyzed using the CompressedArchive.Extract() function and the whole directory tree is saved in a LayerSizes struct (see data.go). The resulting structures are converted to json and sent to the frontend.

  3. The frontend code receives the data from the backend and has to perform some conversion so that the data can be visualized as a sunburst chart via sunburst-chart.

FAQ

  1. Should I run this in production?

Absolutely not! There is no good logging, no cleanup and no security audit has been performed. Please only run this for testing on your local machine for now.

Also, the storage backend has no authentication, so anyone with access to the backend, can store images there.

tl;dr; Just run this on your local machine for testing. You have been warned.