Container Runtime

ContainerRuntime is a substrate capability contract — a backend-agnostic, container-shaped resource manager that plugins yield via ContainerRuntimeService. Docker is the reference implementation under runtime/docker/; the contract also admits podman, host-process, and sandbox backends.

App code does not construct a ContainerRuntime directly. Plugin authors yield the service to acquire images and containers and to run exec, network, and image save/load operations. This page documents the abstraction boundary; Docker-specific behavior lives in plugin source.

Yielding the service

import { Effect } from 'effect';
import { ContainerRuntimeService, definePlugin } from '@mysten-incubation/devstack';

export const mything = () =>
	definePlugin({
		id: 'mything',
		role: 'service',
		start: () =>
			Effect.gen(function* () {
				const runtime = yield* ContainerRuntimeService;
				const image = yield* runtime.ensureImage({ contextPath: './docker' });
				const handle = yield* runtime.ensureContainer({
					name: 'mything-1',
					image,
					labels: [
						/* ContainerLabelTuple stamped by the substrate's managed-container helper */
					],
					recreate: 'on-config-change',
				});
				return { handle };
			}),
	});

The supervisor's plugin acquisition path provides ContainerRuntimeService before any plugin's start body runs. Built-in plugins usually go through the substrate ensureManagedContainer helper rather than calling ensureContainer directly — the helper stamps the ContainerLabelTuple so prune / wipe can find the resource.

Surface

ContainerRuntime exposes (full signatures in source):

• ensureImage(build, expected?) — content-addressed image ensure. Backend folds builds into the cache by digest.
• pullImage(ref) — optional pull from a registry reference.
• ensureNetwork(spec) — idempotent per-stack network create. Networks outlive container scopes; they are reaped by wipe / prune, not by per-container scope finalizers.
• ensureContainer(spec) — idempotent container create with a recreate policy enum ('on-failure' | 'never' | 'on-config-change'). Returns a ContainerHandle whose scope owns the finalizer.
• exec(handle, argv, opts?) — one-shot command inside a running container. The caller is the policy holder for a non-zero exit (for example, Sui's internal indexer-db sidecar treats pg_isready non-zero as "retry").
• runOneShot(spec) — docker run --rm for transient containers (e.g. the Move build path).
• inspectByLabels(labels) — enumerate by ownership labels.
• stop(handle, grace) — explicit, grace-bounded stop.
• pauseAndCommit(handle) — snapshot commit; running containers are paused first.
• saveImages(refs, opts?), loadImage(tar), tagImage(src, newTag, opts?), removeImage(ref), inspectImageDigest(ref) — snapshot image transport and digest resolution.
• removeManagedContainers(labelMatch), removeManagedImages(labelMatch), removeManagedNetworks(labelMatch), removeManagedVolumes(labelMatch) — prune and wipe use these, enumerating by ownership labels.

Abstraction boundaries

What ContainerRuntime is responsible for:

• Idempotent ensure semantics keyed by stable name + ownership labels.
• Scope-owned finalizers — ensureContainer requires a Scope so stop runs on scope close.
• Stable handles (ContainerHandle.id, name, labels, imageName, status, ips, ports).
• Backend-level errors only — daemon-unreachable, build-failed, port-conflict, etc.

What plugins own:

• Whether a non-zero exit means "retry", "fail typed", or "fail config".
• Schema, init SQL, and ready probes.
• Per-container configHash for on-config-change policy decisions.
• Whether to publish a host port (ports) or stay in-network.

Error shape

ContainerRuntimeError is a tagged record with a reason union covering the daemon-level surface: daemon-unreachable, image-build-failed, image-save-failed, image-load-failed, image-tag-failed, docker-inspect-failed, foreign-resource, container-replace-failed, name-collision, publish-port-conflict, network-address-pool-exhausted, ip-readback-timeout, ready-probe-failed, recreate-refused, image-remove-failed.

Plugin code typically wraps ContainerRuntimeError in a typed plugin error (SuiPluginError, SealError, etc.) at the phase boundary so the cause walker attributes the failure to the right plugin.