Use multi-stage builds
Estimated reading time: 6 minutesEdge only: This topic is only applicable to Docker CE Edge versions. See Docker CE Edge.
Multi-stage builds are a new feature in Docker 17.05, and they will be exciting to anyone who has struggled to optimize Dockerfiles while keeping them easy to read and maintain.
Acknowledgment: Special thanks to Alex Ellis for granting permission to use his blog post Builder pattern vs. Multi-stage builds in Docker as the basis of the examples below.
Before multi-stage builds
One of the most challenging things about building images is keeping the image size down. Each instruction in the Dockerfile adds a layer to the image, and you need to remember to clean up any artifacts you don’t need before moving on to the next layer. To write a really efficient Dockerfile, you have traditionally needed to employ shell tricks and other logic to keep the layers as small as possible and to ensure that each layer has the artifacts it needs from the previous layer and nothing else.
It was actually very common to have one Dockerfile to use for development (which contained everything needed to build your application), and a slimmed-down one to use for production, which only contained your application and exactly what was needed to run it. This has been referred to as the “builder pattern”. Maintaining two Dockerfiles is not ideal.
Here’s an example of a Dockerfile.build
and Dockerfile
which adhere to the
builder pattern above:
Dockerfile.build
:
FROM golang:1.7.3
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html
COPY app.go .
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html \
&& CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o app .
Notice that this example also artificially compresses two RUN
commands together
using the Bash &&
operator, to avoid creating an additional layer in the image.
This is failure-prone and hard to maintain. It’s easy to insert another command
and forget to continue the line using the \
character, for example.
Dockerfile
:
FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /root/
COPY app .
CMD ["./app"]
build.sh
:
#!/bin/sh
echo Building alexellis2/href-counter:build
docker build --build-arg https_proxy=$https_proxy --build-arg http_proxy=$http_proxy \
-t alexellis2/href-counter:build . -f Dockerfile.build
docker create --name extract alexellis2/href-counter:build
docker cp extract:/go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/app ./app
docker rm -f extract
echo Building alexellis2/href-counter:latest
docker build --no-cache -t alexellis2/href-counter:latest .
rm ./app
When you run the build.sh
script, it needs to build the first image, create
a container from it in order to copy the artifact out, then build the second
image. Both images take up room on your system and you still have the app
artifact on your local disk as well.
Multi-stage builds vastly simplify this situation!
Use multi-stage builds
With multi-stage builds, you use multiple FROM
statements in your Dockerfile.
Each FROM
instruction can use a different base, and each of them begins a new
stage of the build. You can selectively copy artifacts from one stage to
another, leaving behind everything you don’t want in the final image. To show
how this works, Let’s adapt the Dockerfile from the previous section to use
multi-stage builds.
Dockerfile
:
FROM golang:1.7.3
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html
COPY app.go .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o app .
FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=0 /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/app .
CMD ["./app"]
You only need the single Dockerfile. You don’t need a separate build script,
either. Just run docker build
.
$ docker build -t alexellis2/href-counter:latest .
The end result is the same tiny production image as before, with a significant reduction in complexity. You don’t need to create any intermediate images and you don’t need to extract any artifacts to your local system at all.
How does it work? The second FROM
instruction starts a new build stage with
the alpine:latest
image as its base. The COPY --from=0
line copies just the
built artifact from the previous stage into this new stage. The Go SDK and any
intermediate artifacts are left behind, and not saved in the final image.
Name your build stages
By default, the stages are not named, and you refer to them by their integer
number, starting with 0 for the first FROM
instruction. However, you can
name your stages, by adding an as <NAME>
to the FROM
instruction. This
example improves the previous one by naming the stages and using the name in
the COPY
instruction. This means that even if the instructions in your
Dockerfile are re-ordered later, the COPY
won’t break.
FROM golang:1.7.3 as builder
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html
COPY app.go .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o app .
FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=builder /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/app .
CMD ["./app"]
Next steps
- Check out the blog post Builder pattern vs. Multi-stage builds in Docker for full source code and a walk-through of these examples.
- Check out other features available in Docker Edge