Two ways to integrate NVM in Docker images

This is just an example of my approach to make NVM easily available in Docker images or CI/CD.

Hack used here allow to just copy your code to the Docker image and install whatever version of Node you need.

Explanation

The structure of Docker images:

graph LR
    O(ubuntu:22.04) -- source nvm --> A
    O(ubuntu:22.04) -- wrap nvm --> B
    A(tgagor/base-v1/nvm) --> C(tgagor/base-v1/node:18)
    B(tgagor/base-v2/nvm) --> E(tgagor/base-v2/node:18)

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All images are based on Ubunut 22.04 and install the same version of NVM.

• tgagor/base-v1/* images try to source nvm.sh,
• tgagor/base-v2/* images use wrappers (my preferred solution).

You can build all images calling:

make build

You can list them by:

make list

You can run tests by:

make test

Summing up the tests:

• v1 images can't call node without sourcing nvm.sh each time - so it's possible... but it's painful.
• v2 just works as it was running on your local machine.