Thanks a lot!

Yeah, if I go down that road, I’ll probably just add a git commit hook on the repo for the Raspberry Pi, so that I’ll have a ‘push to deploy’ workflow!

You are asking exactly the right questions!

I have an Ansible playbook to provision the Pi (or any other Debian/Ubuntu machine) with everything need to run a web application, as long as the web application is a binary or uses one of the interpreters of the machine. (Well, I have also playbooks to compile Python/Ruby from source or get an Adoptium JDK repository etc.)

Right now I am flirting with the idea of using Elixir for my next web application, and it just seems unsustainable for me to now add Erlang/OTP and Elixir to my list of playbooks to compile from source.

The Debian repositories have quite old versions of Erlang/OTP/Elixir and I doubt there are enough users to keep security fixes/patches up to date.

Combined with the list of technologies I already use, it seems to reduce complexity if I use Docker containers as deployment units and should be future proof for at least the next decade.

Writing about it, another solution might simply be to have something like Distrobox on the PI and use something like the latest Alpine.

Thanks for the idea! I try to keep as little ‘moving’ parts as possible, so hosting gitlab is something I would want to avoid if possible. The Raspberry Pi is supposed to be sole hardware for the whole deployment of the project.

Wow, thanks a lot! Your answer is exactly what I hoped for when posting on Lemmy: I didn’t even know the docker-tarball thingy is a thing, it fits my problem space very nice in combination with cross building and it seems as easy as it can be. Excellent! :-)

Thanks, didn’t know about buildx, but it looks exactly like what I need to solve cross compilation.

AFAIK Podman only supports quadlets from version 4.4 and later, I am on version 4.3… so, technically you are right and it would work (for me end of the year or next year, when Raspbian gets an update to Trixie), I am mostly interested how people achieved this and automated this and if there are different/better approaches than the ones outlined by me above.

My development machine is an AMD64 and the Pi is an Aarch64… I have no clue how complicated cross-building images for a different architecture is?!? (I am thinking about using something like Erlang/Elixir, so I honestly don’t know at all.)

I am not totally opposed to use a registry (free or payed), but, correct me if I am wrong: If I just build the image on the Pi, it is already exactly at the one spot where I need it, so what problem is solved for me by using a registry?

Edit: Someone above mentioned docker buildx, so seems cross compilation is solved.

Thanks for the link!

Exactly, this is what I am doing right now (just for binaries, not execute Docker or Podman).

Would it be a problem, that my development machine is an AMD64 and the Pi is an Aarch64?