buildkit VS buildx

Compare buildkit vs buildx and see what are their differences.

buildkit

concurrent, cache-efficient, and Dockerfile-agnostic builder toolkit (by moby)

buildx

Docker CLI plugin for extended build capabilities with BuildKit (by docker)
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buildkit buildx
55 29
8,006 3,432
1.4% 2.2%
9.8 9.7
5 days ago 5 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

buildkit

Posts with mentions or reviews of buildkit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-07-12.
  • Using S3 as a Container Registry
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2024
    At the very real risk of talking out of my ass, the new versioned Dockerfile mechanism on top of builtkit should enable you to do that: https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/v0.15.0/frontend/docke...

    In true "when all you have is a hammer" fashion, as very best I can tell that syntax= directive is pointing to a separate docker image whose job it is to read the file and translate it into builtkit api calls, e.g. https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/v0.15.0/frontend/docke...

    But, again for clarity: I've never tried such a stunt, that's just the impression I get from having done mortal kombat with builtkit's other silly parts

  • Caching PNPM Modules in Docker Builds in GitHub Actions
    4 projects | dev.to | 6 May 2024
    The currently proposed solution is to allow Docker to bind the cache directory in the build to a directory on the host. This way the cache could be persisted externally. However, this issue has been opened for almost 4 years (May 27, 2020) with no clear answer as to whether it'll be implemented any time soon.
  • ARM vs x86 em Docker
    1 project | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
  • The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Dec 2023
    > We are uding docker-in-docker at the moment

    You can also run a "less privileged" container with all the features of Docker by using rootless buildkit in Kubernetes. Here are some examples:

    https://github.com/moby/buildkit/tree/master/examples/kubern...

    https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/examples/kubern...

    It's also possible to run dedicated buildkitd workers and connect to them remotely.

  • Show HN: Dockerfile Explorer
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Nov 2023
    - BuildOp evaluates its input as additional LLB operations to add to the graph to allow for dynamic build graphs (also unused in the Dockerfile frontend)

    With the Dockerfile Explorer, we run the Dockerfile frontend[1] that BuildKit uses inside of WASM to parse and produce the LLB output locally in your browser. We then embed the Monaco Editor so that you can change your Dockerfile to see how it impacts the LLB output that BuildKit will use to build your Docker image.

    You can see a quick video and read more details on how it all works here: https://depot.dev/blog/dockerfile-explorer.

    We'd love any feedback or ideas folks would like around this type of tool!

    [0] https://github.com/moby/buildkit#exploring-llb

  • macOS Containers v0.0.1
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
  • Jenkins Agents On Kubernetes
    7 projects | dev.to | 4 Sep 2023
    Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):
  • Frequent Docker BuildKit cache misses with w/ multi-stage and docker-container
    1 project | /r/docker | 11 Jul 2023
    There's a 2-year-old moby/buildkit GitHub issue about frequent build cache misses when using the BuildKit docker-container driver and multi-stage builds. Anyone else in this sub run into this problem and/or have reasonable workarounds? It seems like something that should come up pretty often.
  • A Panic in BuildKit: an Open Source Journey
    1 project | /r/golang | 4 Jul 2023
    A couple months ago I encountered a bug in buildkit - when enabling OpenTelemetry tracing, we got occasional panics. With a bit of investigation, we found the cause, fixed and tested in our fork and internal deployments, and pushed to upstream.
  • Is it possible to copy files from a manifest in Dockerfile?
    1 project | /r/docker | 11 May 2023
    I do some search in the internet and there seems to be no good solution, so I just create a feature request: https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/3859

buildx

Posts with mentions or reviews of buildx. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-05-09.
  • Docker and WSL2 without Docker Desktop
    2 projects | dev.to | 9 May 2024
    To install the newest builder, download the latest version of the buildxplugin by visiting https://github.com/docker/buildx/releases. Find the most recent release, go to the “Assets” section, and expand the list of assets. Download the file that ends with windows-amd64.exe, like buildx-v0.14.0.windows-amd64.exe. Place the downloaded file in the cli-plugins folder you created earlier, and rename it to docker-buildx.exe. Now, the command docker build will automatically use the new builder.
  • BuildKit in depth: Docker's build engine explained
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Feb 2024
    This is great! I’ve been waiting a long time for this and it seems like more debug features are in the pipeline too: https://github.com/docker/buildx/issues/1104

    Docs: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/buildx_...

  • Nx + NextJS + Docker - The Nx way: Creating the NextJS application
    6 projects | dev.to | 27 Jun 2023
    Container engine: Docker v23.0.4 | Buildx v0.10.4
  • Using Docker Buildx to Create Cross-Platform Docker Images for Seamless Compatibility
    1 project | dev.to | 14 May 2023
  • Cross-platform container images with buildx and colima
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Apr 2023
    ARCH=amd64 # change to 'arm64' for M1 VERSION=v0.10.4 curl -LO https://github.com/docker/buildx/releases/download/${VERSION}/buildx-${VERSION}.darwin-${ARCH} mkdir -p ~/.docker/cli-plugins mv buildx-${VERSION}.darwin-${ARCH} ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-buildx chmod +x ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-buildx docker buildx version # verify installation
  • Help Downloading Buildx on Play-with-Docker Instance
    2 projects | /r/docker | 13 Mar 2023
    wget -O /tmp/docker/cli-plugins/docker-buildx https://github.com/docker/buildx/releases/tag/v0.10.4/buildx-v0.10.4.linux-amd64
  • docker-ce upgrade broke my builds
    2 projects | /r/docker | 6 Feb 2023
    Your particular one looks somewhat like https://github.com/docker/buildx/issues/1595.
  • One Dockerfile is all it takes, falling in love with bake
    5 projects | dev.to | 16 Jan 2023
    Now, we have examples of the actual definitions for a single application’s docker container. Notice that we set the contexts key here which references the dependency targets we just defined. You can basically think of this like the depends_on block if you’ve used Terraform before. The args key let’s us populate the ARG variables in the Dockerfile. This is what is ultimately different between each of the containers. In the future, the buildx team might support using for_each loops like in Terraform but for now each block will have a bit of duplication.
  • Optimize your docker containers
    2 projects | dev.to | 21 Oct 2022
    Now as bonus we i will add how to use this techniques to build a multi arch build container. Maybe you have the same application but you need to run it in arm or riscv architecture. For this we can use the buildx plugin from docker https://github.com/docker/buildx.
  • Pushing Cutom Images to Docker Hub using GitHub Actions
    7 projects | dev.to | 30 Sep 2022
    Third step is docker/setup-buildx-action configures buildx, which is a Docker CLI plugin that provides enhanced build capabilities.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing buildkit and buildx you can also consider the following projects:

buildah - A tool that facilitates building OCI images.

ghaction-docker-meta - GitHub Action to extract metadata (tags, labels) for Docker [Moved to: https://github.com/docker/metadata-action]

kaniko - Build Container Images In Kubernetes

aws-graviton-getting-started - Helping developers to use AWS Graviton2, Graviton3, and Graviton4 processors which power the 6th, 7th, and 8th generation of Amazon EC2 instances (C6g[d], M6g[d], R6g[d], T4g, X2gd, C6gn, I4g, Im4gn, Is4gen, G5g, C7g[d][n], M7g[d], R7g[d], R8g).

jib - 🏗 Build container images for your Java applications.

build-push-action - GitHub Action to build and push Docker images with Buildx

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

crates.io-index - Registry index for crates.io

nerdctl - contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ...

multi-platform-docker-build - Using BuildKit and TARGETPLATFORM for cross-platform Dockerfiles

amazon-ecr-login - Logs into Amazon ECR with the local Docker client.

official-images - Primary source of truth for the Docker "Official Images" program

InfluxDB - Purpose built for real-time analytics at any scale.
InfluxDB Platform is powered by columnar analytics, optimized for cost-efficient storage, and built with open data standards.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured

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