Felt a few pains using concourse to manage my teams very large testing & release structure. One major pain was the way script dependencies were being used within tasks and jobs. In order to provide consistency with the scripts and programs that all tasks had access to, we would build a docker image with these scripts and executable.

After a while the docker image bloated to a few GB’s in size which wasn’t ideal because every time a task would run for the first time, it would have to pull that large image making pipeline runs slower. Overall it’s probably an anti-pattern; concourse images should have what’s required to run its associated task.

I had a “novel” idea about a custom concourse resource that could download and use executable binaries needed within tasks instead of preloading them into docker images. Source code here