Why Dockerfiles

Let’s see a build that requires base image extension in order to succeed.

Examine hello-extensions buildpack

detect

cat $PWD/samples/buildpacks/hello-extensions/bin/detect

The buildpack always detects (because its exit code is 0) but doesn’t require any dependencies (as the output build plan is empty).

build

cat $PWD/samples/buildpacks/hello-extensions/bin/build

The buildpack tries to use tree at build-time, and defines a launch process called curl that runs curl --version at runtime.

Create a builder with extensions and publish it

For now, it is necessary for the builder image to be pushed to an OCI registry for builds with image extensions to succeed.

For demo purposes, we will launch a local unauthenticated registry:

docker run -d --rm -p 5000:5000 registry:2

You can push the builder to any registry of your choice - just ensure that docker login succeeds and replace localhost:5000 in the following examples with your registry namespace - e.g., index.docker.io/<username>.

Create the builder:

pack builder create localhost:5000/extensions-builder \
  --config $PWD/samples/builders/alpine/builder.toml \
  --publish

Build the application image

Run pack build (note that the “source” directory is effectively ignored in our example):

pack build hello-extensions \
  --builder localhost:5000/extensions-builder \
  --network host \
  --path $PWD/samples/apps/java-maven \
  --pull-policy always \
  --verbose

Note that --network host is necessary when publishing to a local registry.

You should see:

[detector] ======== Results ========
[detector] pass: samples/tree@0.0.1
[detector] pass: samples/hello-extensions@0.0.1
[detector] Resolving plan... (try #1)
[detector] skip: samples/tree@0.0.1 provides unused tree
[detector] 1 of 2 buildpacks participating
[detector] samples/hello-extensions 0.0.1
...
[extender] Running build command
[extender] ---> Hello Extensions Buildpack
[extender] /cnb/buildpacks/samples_hello-extensions/0.0.1/bin/build: line 6: tree: command not found
[extender] ERROR: failed to build: exit status 127

What happened: our builder doesn’t have tree installed, so the hello-extensions buildpack failed to build (as it tries to run tree --version in its ./bin/build script).

Even though there is a samples/tree extension that passed detection (pass: samples/tree@0.0.1), because the hello-extensions buildpack didn’t require tree in the build plan, the extension was omitted from the detected group (skip: samples/tree@0.0.1 provides unused tree).

Let’s take a look at how the samples/tree extension installs tree on the builder image…

Next Step