Development Report for June 12, 2017

Buildkit

Proposal

More updates to the POC repo. It now contains binaries for the daemon and client. Examples directory shows a way for invoking a build job by generating the internal low-level build graph definition with a helper binary(as there is not support for frontends yet). The grpc control server binary can be built in two versions, one that connects to containerD socket and other that doesn't have any external dependencies.

If you have questions or want to help, stop by the issues section of that repo or the proposal in moby/moby.

Typed Dockerfile parsing

PR

New PR that enables parsing Dockerfiles into typed structures so they can be preprocessed to eliminate unnecessary build stages and reused with different kinds of dispatchers.

Long running session & incremental file sending

PR

Same status as last week. The PR went through one pass of review from @dnephin and has been rebased again. Maintainers are encouraged to give this one a review so it can be included in v17.07 release.

Quality: Dependency interface switch

Move file copying from the daemon to the builder PR is waiting for a second review.

Proposals for new Dockerfile features that need design feedback:

Add IMPORT/EXPORT commands to Dockerfile

Add DOCKEROS/DOCKERARCH default ARG to Dockerfile

Add support for RUN --mount

DAG image builder

Option to export the hash of the build context (new)

Allow --cache-from=* (new)

Provide advanced .dockeringore use-cases 2

If you are interested in implementing any of them, leave a comment on the specific issues.

Other builder PRs merged last week

Builder features currently in code-review:

Warn/deprecate continuing on empty lines in Dockerfile

Fix behavior of absolute paths in .dockerignore

Backlog

Build secrets has not got much traction. If you want this feature to become a reality, please make yourself heard.