Dockerfile guidance
This style guide:
- provides some conventions for creating production-ready Dockerfiles at GDS
- supplements the official Dockerfile reference
Using tags and digests in FROM instructions
The FROM
instruction specifies the starting image for your Docker image build.
A tag is a short label you can use to reference an image.
For example:
FROM alpine:3.9
where:
alpine
is the image name3.9
is the tag
As you cannot rely on the tag pointing to the exact same image over time, you should instead use a digest, which identifies the image by a hash of its contents. This makes sure that you are always referencing the image that you expect.
For example:
FROM alpine@sha256:769fddc7cc2f0a1c35abb2f91432e8beecf83916c421420e6a6da9f8975464b6
Where sha256@769fddc7cc2f0a1c35abb2f91432e8beecf83916c421420e6a6da9f8975464b6
is the unique digest representing the particular variant of the image.
To get the digest, run docker pull <tag>
. For example:
$ docker pull alpine:3.9
3.9: Pulling from library/alpine
Digest: sha256:769fddc7cc2f0a1c35abb2f91432e8beecf83916c421420e6a6da9f8975464b6
Status: Image is up-to-date for alpine:3.9
As Dependabot has support for updating FROM
lines
which use digests,
you can still use Dependabot to keep your images up-to-date.
Using multi-stage builds
Using multi-stage builds enables the drastic reduction of image sizes, which in turn decreases the time taken to launch the container. There can be many stages within a Dockerfile. The result is a single layer image which discards the previous unrequired layers that were used in the compilation steps.
As an example;
FROM golang:1.16 AS builder
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/alphagov/paas-aiven-broker/
RUN git clone https://github.com/alphagov/paas-aiven-broker.git .
RUN go mod download
RUN go build
FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=builder /go/src/github.com/alphagov/paas-aiven-broker/paas-aiven-broker .
COPY --from=builder /go/src/github.com/alphagov/paas-aiven-broker/paas-aiven-broker/examples/config.json .
CMD ["./paas-aiven-broker", "-config", "config.json"]
Building from this Dockerfile requires no changes to the existing build process e.g. docker build -t myimage:latest .
It is also possible to stop the build at a specific stage using a command such as
docker build --target builder -t myimage:development .
which then enables running the container locally to debug the image.
Running programs as process ID (PID) 1
The program running as PID 1 inside a container is responsible for:
- cleaning up orphaned child processes
- handling signals
- returning the exit status from the container
Most programs are unsuited to running as PID 1 inside a container. For example:
bash
will not pass signals through to its children; for example,SIGTERM
will not lead to the container being shut downjava
exits with an exit status of 143 when sent a SIGTERM, even if the application shuts down cleanlynode
does not reap orphaned child processes whose parent has exited
Tini provides a program suitable for running as PID 1 inside the container. You can use Tini to avoid the problems highlighted above. Tini is included by default with the Docker runtime or Alpine Linux images.
You can use tini
by passing the --init
option to Docker when running your
container or set Tini as the ENTRYPOINT
for your container. For example:
ENTRYPOINT ["tini", "--"]
or for Java programs, to map an exit status of 143 to 0:
ENTRYPOINT ["tini", "-e", "143", "--"]
Subshells
The instructions RUN
, CMD
and ENTRYPOINT
have 2 forms:
- freeform text (for example
CMD “run -x”
) - an array-style (for example
CMD [“run”, “-x”]
)
You should use the array-style syntax where possible.
A Linux syscall will directly execute all commands specified using the array-style syntax, without an enclosing subshell. This process is more efficient and removes any ambiguity over how the commands will be interpreted.
In the case of ENTRYPOINT
or CMD
, using the freeform text syntax means that
a shell becomes PID 1 and most programs should not run as PID 1, as explained
above.
For more information about the special role of PID 1:
- avoid running NodeJS as PID 1 under Docker images
- docker-node best practices - Handling Kernel Signals
- Docker and the PID 1 zombie reaping problem
Links
- A smarter Dockerfile linter that helps you build best practice Docker images
conftest
policy to validate the label rules