Preliminary Steps

Please confirm you have...

• reviewed How Linguist Works,
• reviewed the Troubleshooting docs,
• considered implementing an override,
• verified an issue has not already been logged for your issue (linguist issues).

Problem Description

I'm using linguist from a Node.js project and have almost zero knowledge in Ruby, Ruby Gem and so on. To me github-linguist is just a CLI command I know how to call.

const { stdout } = await execa("github-linguist", ["--json"], {
  cwd: sourceDir,
});

Installing github-linguist locally on Mac OS is not a big deal, however this becomes quite a challenge if I want to call the same command from CI. We use Azure DevOps, in which hosted agents do not come with Ruby. This means that every time I want to run a JavaScript command that depends on github-linguist I need to start the CI Job with this:

Note that the task called Install linguist takes nearly 10 minutes. This is a simple call of gem install github-linguist.

It would be great if github-linguist was made available as an official docker image that I could invoke instead of obtaining Ruby and calling gem install. The CLI command would look something like:

const { stdout } = await execa("docker", [
  "run",
  "--rm",
  "--volume=${sourceDir}:/src",
  "github-linguist:alpine",
  "--json",
]);

Pulling a docker image and spinning a one-off docker container would take seconds, so a lot of CI time would be saved.

There already exists a third-party docker wrapper for linguist (published at crazymax/linguist), but I believe the official version would be a much better thing to have for the community. Some companies do not allow use of non-official docker images as they are more likely to contain unsafe code. The official image is not only trustworthy, but is also more likely to be constantly maintained.

WDYT of publishing an official image to https://hub.docker.com/_/github-linguist?

URL of the affected repository:

Any