This repo manages the Docker image for the OpenSAFELY Python runtime. These images are based on a base Ubuntu LTS version, and come pre-installed with a set of standard scientific python packages.
The current latest version is v2, and you should use that unless you have
a specific reason. You can use it in your project.yaml like so:
actions:
my_action:
run: python:v2 my_script.py ...
Current available versions, in reverse chronological order:
- v2: Ubuntu 22.04 and Python 3.10 - full package list
- v1: Ubuntu 20.04 and Python 3.8 - full package list
Initially, OpenSAFELY only had one version of the python image. This is the
v1 image, but was originally published under the :latest tag. You can use
either v1 or latest - they are the same version. In future, we may
deprecate the latest tag and require users to update their project.yaml to
use v1 instead of latest.
For each version of the python image, we do not upgade the python packages from their initially installed version. This is done in order to backwards compatiblity and thus ensure reproduciblity. We do add new packages on user request, as such a change will not break backwards incompatibilty.
Occasionally, we will create a new major version of the image with all packages updated to their latest version. We may also possibly remove old and uneeded pacakges at this point. A new major version is chance to make backwards incompatible changes, which is occasionally needed.
Once this new version of the image is intially released, its set of package versions will be frozen and no longer updatable.
We do update the underlying operating system packages on a regular basis, in order to apply security updates to the base system. It is very unlikely that this will break backwards compatibility, as these are a small set very conservative set of updates to address security issues.
We also add additional operating system libraries on user request.