Documentation on not downloading agent

[bitdivision]

By default scout downloads the core agent as part of its initialization. I wanted to move this download into our docker container build stage in order to remove the external runtime dependency and minimize startup time.

I'd imagine this would be a fairly common desire, and there's not much documentation about it. As far as I can tell it requires using an undocumented setting (core_agent_full_name). It looks as though the library includes the core_agent_full_name parameter as part of the core agent directory.

I had to pass the following settings to the library:

"core_agent_dir": "/scout_core_agent",
"core_agent_download": False,
"core_agent_full_name": "scout_apm_core-latest-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl"

and then add this to my dockerfile:

RUN mkdir -p /scout_apm_core/scout_apm_core-latest-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
WORKDIR /scout_apm_core
RUN curl https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/scout-public-downloads/apm_core_agent/release/scout_apm_core-latest-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tgz --output core-agent-download.tgz
RUN tar -xvzf core-agent-download.tgz -C scout_apm_core-latest-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
RUN rm core-agent-download.tgz

Just adding this issue for anyone else who runs into this and might be helpful to update the docs.

[jrothrock]

Hey @bitdivision

I apologize, we are in the process of moving over our docs to an updated version, and only the new version of our docs has instructions on how to use the docker image:
https://scoutapm.com/docs/core-agent#with-docker

[bitdivision]

Ah, that's useful to know, thanks @jrothrock

I think it's still worth adding the core_agent_full_name setting to https://scoutapm.com/docs/python/configuration#core-agent-configurations, or alternatively removing the need for specifying it when you're not downloading the agent.

[jrothrock]

Ah yup completely agree. I will add it

[jrothrock]

Closing as this was added to the docs