This started with a consulting snafu: Government organisation A got government organisation B to develop a web application. Government organisation B subcontracted part of the work to somebody. Hosting and maintenance of the project was later contracted out to a private-sector company C. Company C discovered that the subcontracted somebody (who was long gone) had built a custom Docker image and made it a dependency of the build system, but without committing the original Dockerfile. That left company C with a contractual obligation to manage a Docker image they had no source code for. Company C calls me in once in a while to do various things, so doing something about this mystery meat Docker image became my job.

Fortunately, the Docker image format is a lot more transparent than it could be. A little detective work is needed, but a lot can be figured out just by pulling apart an image file. As an example, here’s a quick walkthrough of an image for the Prettier code formatter. (In fact, it’s so easy, there’s a tool for it. Thanks Ezequiel Gonzalez Rial.)