buildx VS Lean and Mean Docker containers

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_...

Container engine: Docker v23.0.4 | Buildx v0.10.4

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

wget -O /tmp/docker/cli-plugins/docker-buildx https://github.com/docker/buildx/releases/tag/v0.10.4/buildx-v0.10.4.linux-amd64

Your particular one looks somewhat like https://github.com/docker/buildx/issues/1595.

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.

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.

Third step is docker/setup-buildx-action configures buildx, which is a Docker CLI plugin that provides enhanced build capabilities.

And if you want to make the container quickly secure without bloats, maybe give this a try https://github.com/slimtoolkit/slim

Slim.ai presents the data in a more user friendly way than many of the other tools in this post. On top of its open source SlimToolkit for identifying the contents of an image, Slim.ai uses Trivy for vulnerability scanning.

What about https://github.com/slimtoolkit/slim?

A last practice that I do not use at all and which may interest you is to use slim toolkit to keep only the useful elements in your final image.

Anyone tried using https://github.com/docker-slim/docker-slim To minify an image?..

Distroless images are better left for people with serious need for lightweight images and good Linux knowledge because they require lot of planning with the build so that they stay light and work. If you need lighter images but docker isn't your main tool and you can't afford to take hours and hours of practicing different build strategies you can check docker-slim (https://dockersl.im/). With this tool you can easily size down the images.

Maybe this would help in that regard: https://github.com/docker-slim/docker-slim