Docker containers have been around for some time already, Red Hat not only ships dozens of them in the Container Catalog, but popularity of Open Shift proves that the containers are the future, not only for the DevOps use cases. Recently, the containers started to finally be main topic in Fedora distribution as well, which is proofed by new Container Guidelines that are still being developed.
So what to do to create own container and make it available for other community users in Fedora? First, you need to know how to prepare the Dockerfile and supporting files. For that, I recommend to follow the Best Practices and of course the Fedora Container Guidelines mentioned above. The container should do something sane on start, it should not be just RPMs installed in the container. For example daemons like databases should run the daemon, they should also initiate the datadir etc.
On the other hand, we can expect different behaviour from containers like Python or NodeJS, where those will probably be used only as a base for other container images. Especially for those kind of containers I really recommend to use the standardized tool called source-to-image, that takes a builder image and an application source as input and combines them to a new image as output. Although the source-to-image concept was originally designed for containers like Python or NodeJS (basically runtime of various languages), it may be used for daemon images as well -- in case of HTTPD server the application is composed from static files, in case of databases it can be configuration or initial data. In all those cases the end user will probably need to do some own changes, that require creating an adjusted container (ideally a thin layer on top of what distribution provides).
Ok, let's say we have a Dockerfile prepared, what next when we want to build a container in Fedora? Then we can continue similarly as with RPMs -- we need to create a Container Review bug in Bugzilla, similar as some already exist.
After another packager provides the flag, which says the container follows the guidelines, you can build the container in the koji. Yes, the build tool koji supports docker containers building now, and the tool to make this happen is the fedpkg tool, the same tool that is used to build RPMs as well. We only need to use container-build command, instead of just build. After that, container will be available in the Fedora registry under registry.fedoraproject.org and image can be obviously pulled using the docker client, as usually.
Some more insight about which containers are already available can give listing all the components under docker namespace in the Fedora dist-git.
That's all for the quick update about container in Fedora. So, what container are you working on already?