Stack

What is a stack?

A stack provides the buildpack lifecycle with build-time and run-time environments in the form of images.

If you’re using the pack CLI, running pack suggest-stacks will display a list of recommended stacks that can be used when running pack create-builder, along with each stack’s associated build and run images.

Using stacks

Stacks are used by builders and are configured through a builder’s configuration file:

[[buildpacks]]
  # ...

[[order]]
  # ...

[stack]
  id = "com.example.stack"
  build-image = "example/build"
  run-image = "example/run"
  run-image-mirrors = ["gcr.io/example/run", "registry.example.com/example/run"]

By providing the required [stack] section, a builder author can configure a stack’s ID, build image, and run image (including any mirrors).

Run image mirrors

Run image mirrors provide alternate locations for run images, for use during build (or rebase). When running build with a builder containing run image mirrors, pack will select a run image whose registry location matches that of the specified app image (if no registry host is specified in the image name, DockerHub is assumed). This is useful when publishing the resulting app image (via the --publish flag or via docker push), as the app’s base image (i.e. run image) will be located on the same registry as the app image itself, reducing the amount of data transfer required to push the app image.

In the following example, assuming a builder configured with the example TOML above, the selected run image will be registry.example.com/example/run.

$ pack build registry.example.com/example/app

while naming the app without a registry specified, example/app, will cause example/run to be selected as the app’s run image.

$ pack build example/app

For local development, it’s often helpful to override the run image mirrors in a builder. For this, the set-run-image-mirrors command can be used. This command does not modify the builder, and instead configures the user’s local machine.

To see what run images are configured for a builder, the inspect-builder command can be used. inspect-builder will output built-in and locally-configured run images for a given builder, among other useful information. The order of the run images in the output denotes the order in which they will be matched during build.

Creating custom stacks

To create a custom stack, simply create customized build and run images containing the following information:

Labels

Environment Variables

NOTE: The stack identifier implies compatibility with other stacks of that same identifier. For instance, a custom stack may use io.buildpacks.stacks.bionic as its identifier so long as it will work with buildpacks that declare compatibility with the io.buildpacks.stacks.bionic stack.

Resources

For sample stacks, see our samples repo.

For technical details on stacks, see the platform specification for stacks.