When it comes to containerization and packaging, docker has proven itself capable of shortening the development time and ensuring consistency across multiple environments. In this way, cross-team communication and collaboration have been made more efficient, with decreased set-up time while management of issues that arise have ceased to be #ItIsYourMachine.
Consider, for one moment, that you were building a project that required shipping to a different platform from the one we were using. Better yet, we want it to act exactly the same way as it does locally.
Sidenote: I have had my fair share of deployments during which some library was perfectly fine in development only to discover ubuntu 22.0 or some other version did not support it anymore.
For this illustration, we shall take the program, marvinkweyu/minigrep, a command-line tool that lets you search via text files; a mimic of the popular UNIX grep command-line utility.
How would you containerize this?
What method would be the most efficient given the resources?
Let us understand this.
(Clone the minigrep command-line program to your local file system if you have not done so already)
A single dockerfile
Create a dockerfile at the root of the project directory that looks like below:
FROM rust:latest
WORKDIR /myawesomeapp
# copy the source file onto the /app directory
COPY . .
# compile into executable
RUN cargo build
# run the project
ENTRYPOINT ["./target/debug/minigrep", "to" , "poem.txt"]
Above, we tell minigrep to look for characters that match the consecutive to.
Finally, build your image as the first of its kind by running this in the same root directory:
docker image build -t minigrep:v1 .
What is the possible size of this build?
docker images minigrep
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
minigrep v1 c4c56d10c4b2 About a minute ago 1.41GB
You can play around with a container of the image to see what minigrep finds:
docker container run minigrep:v1
Observe: minigrep:v1
Using the builder pattern
The v2 to reproducible code
Earlier, we build our image using a single dockerfile. Along with the executable, it had non-essential build files. That is, files it did not need at run-time to actually work.
We could change this by creating two images instead. the first would contain all the necessary files we needed before the build and act as the image build. The second would contain only what was needed for the package to run.
The builder image would look similar to the normal build:
FROM rust:latest
WORKDIR /myawesomeapp
# copy the source file onto the /app directory
COPY . .
# compile into executable
RUN cargo build
# run the project
ENTRYPOINT ["./target/debug/minigrep", "to" , "poem.txt"]
In comes the runtime image:
FROM rust:latest
WORKDIR /myawesomeapp
# copy the source file onto the /app directory
COPY . .
# compile into executable
RUN cargo build
# run the project
ENTRYPOINT ["./target/debug/minigrep", "to" , "poem.txt"]
We minimize our image even further by using an alpine image, 5MB in size, rather than the 800MB default rust image.
Remember, we have already compiled our code and all that it requires.
To manage assets from one image to the other, we need to copy the compiled code onto the runtime image. A transfer of files between two images if you may.
To achieve this, we would navigate into a container of the build image, copy the compiled code onto the current working directory and let the runtime image dockerfile copy the required file(s) into itself as it creates the final image.
The command would look something like this:
docker container cp minigrepv:/myawesomeapp/main .
Once this is done, we would then delete the initial build image as it is no longer required, giving us that one single docker image for spawning containers.
To shorten this and the cycle of commands you would have to run, create a develop.sh file with the following contents: (This assumes you have bash on your system)
docker image build -t minigrep-build-image -f Dockerfile.build .
docker container create --name minigrepv2-build-container minigrep-build-image
docker container cp minigrepv2-build-container:/myawesomeapp/target/debug/minigrep .
docker container cp minigrepv2-build-container:/myawesomeapp/poem.txt .
docker image build -t minigrep-runtime-image .
docker container rm -f minigrepv2-build-container
rm minigrep
Our directory would look as below:
src
target
.gitignore
poem.txt
Cargo.lock
Cargo.toml
README.md
Dockerfile.build
Dockerfile
develop.sh
Run the develop.sh file to build the images:
./develop.sh
This will build the two images, copy the compiled code from one container to the other and delete the build container.
Let’s see how our images differ: docker images ls
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
minigrep-runtime-image latest 0ef6f1b87748 14 seconds ago 11.8MB
minigrep-build-image latest 66d4a2a395c3 16 seconds ago 1.41GB
Walah! A whopping difference of over 1000MB!
In our use of the builder pattern, we have managed to save up to 1GB of file storage in our final image size. The trade-off was that we had to create two docker files, build the first, copy the final file to the local directory, and only the n move this t the final image. Perhaps there is a shorter way.
To observe: minigrep: v2
Multi-stage dockerfiles
Much like the builder pattern, a multi-stage dockerfile will create intermediate images and have our final image of equivalent size. The pro to this methodology, however, is the use of a single Dockerfile. Behold, say goodbye to the bash script and the need to have files copied to the local filesystem before transferring to the final image.
# give the initial image a name
FROM rust:latest as build-image
# Set the working directory
WORKDIR /myawesomeapp
# Copy source file from current directory to container
COPY . .
# Build the application
RUN cargo build
#* build the final image
# give this a name
FROM alpine:latest as runtime-image
# Set the working directory
WORKDIR /myawesomeapp
# copy the compiled code from the initial image onto the runtime image
COPY --from=build-image /myawesomeapp/target/debug/minigrep .
COPY --from=build-image /myawesomeapp/poem.txt .
# Run the application
ENTRYPOINT ["./minigrep", "to" , "poem.txt"]
Go ahead and inspect your image.
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
minigrep v3 2c4927420843 19 seconds ago 11.8MB
What a difference.
What does this look like in other projects? Can we build dependencies separately from the final image in interpreted languages?
Hint: TambuaShamba
Conclusion
We could create a simple dockerfile for smaller products and applications, or go ahead and use multi-stage docker files. The choice remains to the engineer that #builds. Along the way, what you intend to #create , your capacity, your development experience and what you are willing to take differently all sum up to your ideal. Iterate.
