Default base image

Most Galaxy users run their app with the default base image. (For full control over the system libraries available to your app and its precise runtime environment, you can create a custom base image instead.)

A base image is a Docker image. The default base image is stored in the repository meteor/galaxy-app on Docker Hub and is itself based on the repository meteor/ubuntu. The source for these packages can be found in the galaxy-images GitHub repository.

Base image Updates

April 30th, 2021 - Ubuntu Upgrade

Galaxy base Docker image is going to be upgraded by default in all new deploys starting on April 30th, 2021.

It includes a major update to Ubuntu 20.04 Focal, with a lot of security patches and improvements on stability and performance.

If you can’t update your app, check out the next section for a how to, but we recommend that you plan to do it soon!

Breaking Changes

If you don’t use the libraries below in your code you don’t need to worry about these breaking changes.

• wkhtmltox was upgraded to v0.12.6-1

• PhantomJS and poppler were both removed from the base image. If you depend on it, you have two options:

  1. Use the previous fixed base image (20180509T213223Z_b6ad5bc) by changing your settings.json with this:

             "galaxy.meteor.com": {
                 "baseImage": {
                     "repository": "meteor/galaxy-app",
                         "tag":"20180509T213223Z_b6ad5bc"
                 }
             }
     

     Be careful, as you are opting out from new updates!

  2. Create a new custom image including the dependencies you need. For more info, read the docs here.

Migration Steps

• We recommend that you test first your app with the new base image in your staging environment on Galaxy first! Just change your settings.json to include the baseImage (20210423T151822Z_93d0399):

      "galaxy.meteor.com": {
          "baseImage": {
              "repository": "meteor/galaxy-app",
                  "tag":"20210423T151822Z_93d0399"
          }
      }
  

  After deploying, you will be using the same image we are going to use as default starting on 30/April/21.

• Don’t change your baseImage property using Galaxy Edit Settings UI, it’s not going to have any effect. It needs to be a new full deploy to force a new image creation.

• If you don’t deploy a new version of your app you will continue to use the previous base image.

• After testing in a staging environment you have two options to apply this change to your production environment:

  1. Keep this setting in your app and you are ready to go, this base image will be always used.
  2. Starting from April 30th, 2021 you can remove this part of your settings as this base image is going to be the default.

Installed packages

The current Galaxy default base image runs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and comes with a set of packages pre-installed. Please note that in theory the package versions are not frozen and may be updated at any time. However, in practice, we know that many of our users may implicitly rely on the (increasingly outdated) versions of packages in the default base image. As of now, we plan to continue our implicit policy of never upgrading the Ubuntu packages on the default base image. Users who want newer versions of these packages should create a custom base image instead.

Packages useful as part of the build process:

• build-essential
• curl
• wget
• rsync
• git
• xz-utils
• ca-certificates

Packages useful for popular npm packages (primarily image rendering):

• imagemagick
• graphicsmagick
• libcairo2-dev
• poppler-utils
• libjpeg-dev
• wkhtmltopdf (for HTML to PDF conversion including prerequisites)
• libssl-dev
• xfonts-base
• xfonts-75dpi

In addition, the default base image contains several popular versions of Node preinstalled in directories with names like /node-v12.22.0-linux-x64. (Including these versions makes the container build and start process more efficient.) Galaxy uses the official binary distribution of Node from nodejs.org, not the Ubuntu package.

Build time behavior

When you run meteor deploy, your local meteor command-line tool builds your app, bundles it into a tarball, and uploads it to Galaxy. Galaxy then builds a Docker image for your app based on the default base image by running the /app/setup.sh script inside the image. This section describes exactly what the default base image’s /app/setup.sh script does.

First, it extracts your uploaded tarball into the /app directory. The tarball’s contents are all nested under a directory called bundle, so this puts your built app into the /app/bundle directory.

Next, it figures out which version of Node your app was built with. If that version isn’t already part of the image, it downloads and installs it. In either case, it sets the $PATH environment variable to ensure that the correct version of Node is used for the rest of the build process.

Next, it figures out which version of npm your app was built with, and installs that version of npm.

Next, it runs npm install --unsafe-perm inside /app/bundle/programs/server. When building your app, the meteor tool includes the contents of most npm packages in the tarball, but if those packages contain binary code, they may need to be rebuilt for the 64-bit Linux server environment, which is what this command does.

Finally, if the scripts /app/bundle/programs/server/setup.sh or /app/bundle/setup.sh exist, they are executed. (Current versions of Meteor do not make it easy to include these files in your bundle.)

After running all these commands, the Galaxy image builder saves the state of the image to an internal Docker registry.

Run time behavior

When Galaxy runs an app image based on the default base image, it executes a script called /app/run.sh.

This script adds the proper version of Node to $PATH, just like at build time. It also makes the version of Node available in $NODE_VERSION.

If the script /app/bundle/run.sh exists, then this script is executed with bash. (Current versions of Meteor do not make it easy to include this file in your bundle.)

Otherwise, the script runs node $GALAXY_NODE_OPTIONS main.js inside the /app/bundle directory. You can set $GALAXY_NODE_OPTIONS to a flag or space-separated series of flags in your settings.json file if you need fine-grained control over how Node runs your server, such as setting garbage collection flags.