Containerize your Go application with Docker

I am working on a small project with an API written in Go. After some time in development and testing was getting tired of building the binary and uploading it to a test server via SFTP, so I started to look for way putting the project in a container and deploying it with CI tools. More on the CI part in another post.

After some experiments I found that Jess Frazelle uses a Dockerfile like this for many projects with Go:

	FROM golang:alpine as builder
	ENV PATH /go/bin:/usr/local/go/bin:$PATH
	ENV GOPATH /go
	COPY . /go/src/github.com/niklasmerz/myproject
	RUN set -x \
	&& cd /go/src/github.com/niklasmerz/myproject \
	&& go build \
	&& mv myproject /usr/bin/myproject \
	&& rm -rf /go \
	&& echo "Build complete."
	FROM alpine:latest
	RUN apk add --no-cache \
	ca-certificates
	COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/myproject /usr/bin/myproject
	ENTRYPOINT [ "myproject" ]
	CMD [ "" ]

view raw Dockerfile hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I think this is a great and simple solution. It creates a builder container with the Go compiler and builds the binary which gets packed into a small container for deployment.

Comments

[Rémi Lavedrine]

That is a very interesting post.
I have developed something using Go and I would give it a try.
I have never used Docker yet, but I think that it could a good start project to learn Docker. 😄