Feature Request: custom docker images

It appears this is already on the list of planned features… and can’t come soon enough.

For a non-trivial app the image takes a good 2-3 minutes to build before Codex can start working. If we could pre-setup an image on docker and point Codex to this, it would be nearly instant. It would also solve issues with spamming package repositories with requests from the same block of IPs (I’ve already had some setups fail because yarn rate-limited the requests).

The way I imagine this ideally is:

  • Start with any ubuntu image (perhaps any image)
  • Set up my Dockerfile
  • Include a line in the Dockerfile that downloads and runs a setup script from OpenAI to set up whatever Codex needs to exist there.
  • Build locally and upload to docker registry
  • Point OpenAI to this docker image so it can start up with a ready-to-go image and get to work quicker!

Curious if other people on this forum also have thoughts/suggestions.

Hope this helps whoever is designing this great tool. Thanks everyone!

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For me, it is even worse. I cannot do things like integration tests since I am using Supabase for authentication, database and storage. I need VERY BADLY a custom image.

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Adding my voice here as well—this limitation is holding back adoption.

Should I start investing time in workarounds for my specific use case, or are there other alternatives?

Either way, please consider raising the priority on this feature. I’d love to rely on Codex more often.

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The title was slightly ambiguous so I’ve updated it. Please let feel free to edit again if it is incorrect

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Agreed, this would be a welcome improvement. I’m using torch so it would end up being a gig per request if i wanted full testing coverage with the current setup. That seems wasteful for OpenAI and slow for me.

If I am understanding correctly, then this feature would be super helpful for us too. Our app relies on integration tests which require using a real database in a docker-compose setup. Being able to run custom images would make this possible

I think you’re asking for the ability to run images-within-images… other threads have suggested that’s not possible with the current docker setup.

What I’m asking is to be able to build a regular docker container image with e.g. all the apt packages (incl pgsql), ruby versions and gems installed that I need, and put it in a registry, and then tell Codex: “use this as your starter image”.