minimage

Examples and experiments with multi-stage builds, static binaries, and other techniques to obtain MINimal IMAGEs.

This repository contains code samples and Dockerfiles to illustrate a series of blog posts about image size optimization. You can read this series in English: part 1, part 2, part 3; or in French: part 1, part 2, part 3.

Ingredients

This repository contains some sample code:

• hello.c: hello world in C
• hello.go: hello world in Go
• hello.py: hello world in Python
• hello.rs: hello world in Rust
• whatsmyip.go: Go code making one HTTP request to canihazip.com

And a bunch of Dockerfiles to build that code.

Wow that's a lot of Dockerfiles

The goal is to show many combinations of build and run stages: do they work? What's the size of the final image?

Each Dockerfile has a pretty long name, with the following convention:

Dockerfile.PROGRAM-TO-BUILD.BUILD-IMAGE[.RUN-IMAGE]

So, for instance, Dockerfile.hello-java.openjdk-8.openjdk-8-jre-alpine means that the Dockerfile builds the hello.java code sample, using openjdk:8 as the build stage, and openjdk:8-jre-alpine as the run stage.

For single-stage builds (like Dockerfile.hello-rust.rust-alpine) there is no RUN-IMAGE.

Sometimes, the name of the Dockerfile also includes special build parameters, for instance:

• Dockerfile.hello-c.alpine-static.scratch doesn't mean that the build stage is using an image named alpine:static, but that it's using alpine and building the program with extra flags to generate a static binary;
• Dockerfile.whatsmyip.golang-nocgo.scratch doesn't mean that the build stage is using an image named golang:nocgo, but that it's using golang and building the program with extra options to disable cgo.

Show me the sizes of the images!

If you want to compare the sizes of all these images, you can do:

docker-compose build
docker images minimage | sort

Do these images all work?

No! Some of them won't. This shows that some combinations of build and run images are invalid, for reasons explained in the supporting blog post.

If you want to test these images, you can do:

docker-compose up
docker-compose ps

The images that work will show Exit 0. If you want to check what's wrong with the ones that show something else (like Exit 1 or Exit 127), you can run e.g. docker-compose up whatsmyip.golang.scratch or docker run minimage:whatsmyip.golang.scratch.

Extra info

The Compose file is generated automatically using the script mkcompose.sh.

There are some Dockerfiles that won't even build. These ones have the special extension .err and added to a separate Compose file, because having them in the same Compose file would break the build of the others (Compose stops as soon as one build fails).

Contributing

If you want to add code samples or Dockerfiles, feel free to!