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Docker has the capability to automatically construct images by interpreting directives specified in a Dockerfile. A Dockerfile serves as a plain text file encompassing a series of instructions that users can execute through the command line in order to compile an image. The following section elucidates the various commands at your disposal when creating a Dockerfile.
Docker runs instructions in a Dockerfile in order. A Dockerfile must begin with a FROMinstruction. This may be after parser directives, comments, and globally scoped ARGs. The FROM instruction specifies the Parent Image from which you are building. FROM may only be preceded by one or more ARG instructions, which declare arguments that are used in FROM lines in the Dockerfile.
Comment lines are removed before the Dockerfile instructions are executed, which means that the comment in the following example is not handled by the shell executing the echo command, and both examples below are equivalent:
Parser directives are optional, and affect the way in which subsequent lines in a Dockerfile are handled. Parser directives do not add layers to the build, and will not be shown as a build step. Parser directives are written as a special type of comment in the form # directive=value. A single directive may only be used once.
Once a comment, empty line or builder instruction has been processed, Docker no longer looks for parser directives. Instead it treats anything formatted as a parser directive as a comment and does not attempt to validate if it might be a parser directive. Therefore, all parser directives must be at the very top of a Dockerfile.
Parser directives are not case-sensitive. However, convention is for them to be lowercase. Convention is also to include a blank line following any parser directives. Line continuation characters are not supported in parser directives.
The escape character is used both to escape characters in a line, and to escape a newline. This allows a Dockerfile instruction to span multiple lines. Note that regardless of whether the escape parser directive is included in a Dockerfile, escaping is not performed in a RUNcommand, except at the end of a line.
Consider the following example which would fail in a non-obvious way on Windows. The second \ at the end of the second line would be interpreted as an escape for the newline, instead of a target of the escape from the first \. Similarly, the \ at the end of the third line would, assuming it was actually handled as an instruction, cause it be treated as a line continuation. The result of this dockerfile is that second and third lines are considered a single instruction:
One solution to the above would be to use / as the target of both the COPY instruction, and dir. However, this syntax is, at best, confusing as it is not natural for paths on Windows, and at worst, error prone as not all commands on Windows support / as the path separator.
Environment variables (declared with the ENV statement) can also be used in certain instructions as variables to be interpreted by the Dockerfile. Escapes are also handled for including variable-like syntax into a statement literally.
Before the docker CLI sends the context to the docker daemon, it looks for a file named .dockerignore in the root directory of the context. If this file exists, the CLI modifies the context to exclude files and directories that match patterns in it. This helps to avoid unnecessarily sending large or sensitive files and directories to the daemon and potentially adding them to images using ADD or COPY.
The CLI interprets the .dockerignore file as a newline-separated list of patterns similar to the file globs of Unix shells. For the purposes of matching, the root of the context is considered to be both the working and the root directory. For example, the patterns /foo/bar and foo/bar both exclude a file or directory named bar in the foo subdirectory of PATH or in the root of the git repository located at URL. Neither excludes anything else.
The placement of ! exception rules influences the behavior: the last line of the .dockerignorethat matches a particular file determines whether it is included or excluded. Consider the following example:
You can even use the .dockerignore file to exclude the Dockerfile and .dockerignorefiles. These files are still sent to the daemon because it needs them to do its job. But the ADD and COPY instructions do not copy them to the image.
The optional --platform flag can be used to specify the platform of the image in case FROMreferences a multi-platform image. For example, linux/amd64, linux/arm64, or windows/amd64. By default, the target platform of the build request is used. Global build arguments can be used in the value of this flag, for example automatic platform ARGs allow you to force a stage to native build platform (--platform=$BUILDPLATFORM), and use it to cross-compile to the target platform inside the stage.
Unlike the shell form, the exec form does not invoke a command shell. This means that normal shell processing does not happen. For example, RUN [ "echo", "$HOME" ] will not do variable substitution on $HOME. If you want shell processing then either use the shell form or execute a shell directly, for example: RUN [ "sh", "-c", "echo $HOME" ]. When using the exec form and executing a shell directly, as in the case for the shell form, it is the shell that is doing the environment variable expansion, not docker.
Contents of the cache directories persists between builder invocations without invalidating the instruction cache. Cache mounts should only be used for better performance. Your build should work with any contents of the cache directory as another build may overwrite the files or GC may clean it if more storage space is needed.
Apt needs exclusive access to its data, so the caches use the option sharing=locked, which will make sure multiple parallel builds using the same cache mount will wait for each other and not access the same cache files at the same time. You could also use sharing=private if you prefer to have each build create another cache directory in this case.
With --security=insecure, builder runs the command without sandbox in insecure mode, which allows to run flows requiring elevated privileges (e.g. containerd). This is equivalent to running docker run --privileged.
The main purpose of a CMD is to provide defaults for an executing container. These defaults can include an executable, or they can omit the executable, in which case you must specify an ENTRYPOINT instruction as well.
Unlike the shell form, the exec form does not invoke a command shell. This means that normal shell processing does not happen. For example, CMD [ "echo", "$HOME" ] will not do variable substitution on $HOME. If you want shell processing then either use the shell form or execute a shell directly, for example: CMD [ "sh", "-c", "echo $HOME" ]. When using the exec form and executing a shell directly, as in the case for the shell form, it is the shell that is doing the environment variable expansion, not docker.
If you want to run your without a shell then you must express the command as a JSON array and give the full path to the executable. This array form is the preferred format of CMD. Any additional parameters must be individually expressed as strings in the array:
The LABEL instruction adds metadata to an image. A LABEL is a key-value pair. To include spaces within a LABEL value, use quotes and backslashes as you would in command-line parsing. A few usage examples:
An image can have more than one label. You can specify multiple labels on a single line. Prior to Docker 1.10, this decreased the size of the final image, but this is no longer the case. You may still choose to specify multiple labels in a single instruction, in one of the following two ways:
Labels included in base or parent images (images in the FROM line) are inherited by your image. If a label already exists but with a different value, the most-recently-applied value overrides any previously-set value.
The MAINTAINER instruction sets the Author field of the generated images. The LABELinstruction is a much more flexible version of this and you should use it instead, as it enables setting any metadata you require, and can be viewed easily, for example with docker inspect. To set a label corresponding to the MAINTAINER field you could use:
The EXPOSE instruction informs Docker that the container listens on the specified network ports at runtime. You can specify whether the port listens on TCP or UDP, and the default is TCP if the protocol is not specified.
The EXPOSE instruction does not actually publish the port. It functions as a type of documentation between the person who builds the image and the person who runs the container, about which ports are intended to be published. To actually publish the port when running the container, use the -pflag on docker run to publish and map one or more ports, or the -P flag to publish all exposed ports and map them to high-order ports.
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