Feature request: native "fork sprite from checkpoint"

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1

Today restore is in-place only (POST /v1/sprites/{sprite}/checkpoints/{id}/restore) and sprite create has no --from-checkpoint. To seed a new sprite from an existing sprite’s checkpoint, the only option is a full client-side copy of the writable overlay out and back in — for a 723 MB overlay that’s ~330 MB gzipped round-tripping through my laptop, made worse by sprite exec severing streams at ~79 MB and sprite file pull timing out on large files.

Since checkpoints are already copy-on-write snapshots of the upper overlay, the backend should be able to clone one into a new sprite almost for free. Proposed surface:

  • sprite create --from : (CLI), or
  • POST /v1/sprites with { “name”: “…”, “from”: { “sprite”: “…”, “checkpoint”: “v3” } }.

Use case: branching an environment (e.g. a configured dev/playbook setup) into throwaway test sprites without rebuilding from scratch.

3

I would have thought so as well, but the release notes mention that it’s instead taking more than a minute.

The storage side of Sprites is still under heavy development last I heard, so hopefully this will improve. Forking/copying Sprites is one of the forum’s most popular requests: there have been something like twenty separate threads asking for it so far (all apparently unaware of the others).

(The most recent one was two hours ago, actually.)

4

We’ll have more to share soon :trade_mark: here.