compiling-containers VS buildx

A cool thing about Buildkits LLB is that you can write your own front end to BuildKit. At Earthly, this is sort of a starter task for everyone who joins the team.

My frontend was based on intercal and I don't recommend anyone use it[1].

Buildkit functions a bit like a compiler. I wrote an article once about how it all works. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/adamgordonbell/compiling-containers/tree/...

[2]: https://www.docker.com/blog/compiling-containers-dockerfiles...

Earthly is great (disclosure: work on it)

But also checkout out IckFiles, an Intercal frontend for moby buildkit:

https://github.com/adamgordonbell/compiling-containers/tree/...

Hi, I wrote this, thank you for submitting it. I was trying to teach a bit about compilers and container images at the same time and share some working code examples. The code samples are here and here.

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.

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.