This post was first published on the Ministry of Justice Digital & Technology technical blog on July 26th 2019.
Docker has revolutionized the way software engineers build applications, small maintainable pieces of software that can be easily scaled to meet demand. But with new technology, there are now more things to take into consideration. One such issue that arose with Docker is image size. Traditionally to get an efficient docker image you would use some complex shell commands within the Dockerfile to keep the layers as small as possible.
In Docker 17.05 multi-stage builds were introduced and this means we can now make docker images even smaller, below I'm going to go over an example of how to do this with a Symfony app and composer.
With multi-stage builds, you can use multiple FROM commands within a single Dockerfile. Each FROM command can use a different base and symbolises a new stage in the build. The most useful thing is that you can selectively copy artifacts from one stage to another leaving everything that you don't need behind.
So let's create a new Dockerfile and add our first FROM command. This will be using composer as a base image so we can get all of our composer dependencies. We can also name the different stages within the build by adding AS <NAME> to the FROM command.
FROM composer AS composer
Now let's copy over our composer.json, composer.lock. We're also going to add a RUN command which will run a composer install.
FROM composer AS composer
COPY composer.json /app
COPY composer.lock /app
RUN composer install
So the first part of our multi-stage build is done, this will allow us to install our composer dependencies into the first image and then copy them across into the final image.
Next, we need to build our final stage:
FROM php:7-fpm-alpine
WORKDIR /var/www
COPY ./ /app
COPY --from=composer /app/vendor /app/vendor
By using FROM php:7-fpm-alpine we start a new build using php:7-fpm-alpine as the base image, we then use COPY --from=composer to copy over the vendor folder into our new image. We leave all the composer gubbins behind, and it's not saved into our final Image.
Full Dockerfile:
FROM composer AS composer
COPY composer.json /app
COPY composer.lock /app
RUN composer install
FROM php:7-fpm-alpine
WORKDIR /var/www
COPY ./ /app
COPY --from=composer /app/vendor /app/vendor
You only need a single Dockerfile. Just run docker build and docker the build process will start.
The end result of using multi-stage builds is a slim production-ready image without any complexity. I hope you can see the benefits of using multi-stage builds and I would definitely encourage you to try them out.
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