Building on a Base Image

When you start adding multiple services to your app, it’s easiest to just copy a new Dockerfile for each service and tweak a few parameters.

Once you have a few services, that duplication can start to feel messy. Sometimes you update one Dockerfile but forget to update the others. Building all the services is slow.

A common pattern is to create a common base image with the dependencies for multiple services.

With Tilt, you can describe when to re-build each image in the dependency graph.

Building a `node_modules` Base Image

Let’s look at an example. We want to create a NodeJS server with two Docker images:

A Docker image that contains the node_module dependencies.
A Docker image that contains the server source code.

First we write a Dockerfile for the base node_modules image. We’ll call this image nodejs-express-base-image.

# nodejs-express-base-image
# base.dockerfile

FROM node:16-alpine

# Default value; will be overridden by build_args, if passed
ARG node_env=production

ENV NODE_ENV $node_env

WORKDIR '/var/www/app'
ADD package.json package.json
RUN npm install
ENTRYPOINT node server.js

Next we’ll create a Dockerfile for the app image. This is just an empty base image to build on.

# nodejs-express-app-image
# app.dockerfile

FROM nodejs-express-base-image

WORKDIR '/var/www/app'

ADD . .

Lastly, we’ll add a Tiltfile that knows how to build both images.

# Set up the Kubernetes resources.
k8s_yaml('app.yml')

# Configure image build for our external dev dependencies.
docker_build('nodejs-express-base-image',
             './package',
             dockerfile='base.dockerfile',
             build_args={'node_env': 'development'})

# Configure build to copy our source code.
docker_build('nodejs-express-app-image',
             '.',
             dockerfile='app.dockerfile')
             
# Configure the Kubernetes deploys.
k8s_resource('nodejs-express-app', port_forwards=3000)

Notice that the Docker build for nodejs-express-deps uses the subdirectory ./package. Tilt will only rebuild this image when files under ./package change.

When you run tilt up, Tilt will build both images, and make sure that the first image gets injected into the second image.

STEP 1/5 — Building Dockerfile: [nodejs-express-base-image]
Building Dockerfile:
  FROM node:16-alpine
  
  # Default value; will be overridden by build_args, if passed
  ARG node_env=production
  
  ENV NODE_ENV $node_env
  
  WORKDIR '/var/www/app'
  ADD package.json package.json
  RUN npm install
  ENTRYPOINT node server.js

...

STEP 3/5 — Building Dockerfile: [nodejs-express-app-image]
Building Dockerfile:
  FROM localhost:5005/nodejs-express-base-image:tilt-19328501fd376562
  
  WORKDIR '/var/www/app'
  
  ADD . .


     Tarring context…
     Building image
     copy /context / [done: 44ms]
     [1/3] FROM localhost:5005/nodejs-express-base-image:tilt-19328501fd376562
     [2/3] WORKDIR /var/www/app [cached]
     [3/3] ADD . . [done: 18ms]
     exporting to image [done: 21ms]

If you make a change to server.js, Tilt knows it can skip the first image build and just do the second.

Adding Live Updates

Once you’ve got the two image builds working, you can add a live update rule to sync files into your app. This is much faster than building the app image each time.

In this example, we’ll use a sync step to copy the files.

Then we’ll add a custom entrypoint that runs our server with nodemon, which does the reload.

Here’s what it looks like:

docker_build('nodejs-express-app-image',
             '.',
             dockerfile='app.dockerfile',
             live_update=[
               sync('.', '/var/www/app')
             ],
             entrypoint='yarn run nodemon /var/www/app/server.js')

Every app needs to specify both a sync step and a reload step. But reload steps tend to be specific to the programming language and framework you’re using. Some frameworks even handle it automatically. This example uses an entrypoint with nodemon, but the reload step for your project will probably look different. For more examples, see the language-specific example projects or the live update refrence.

Note that live update steps should always be attached to the deployed image, never the base image. Tilt’s live update system matches the image in the container, so needs to be attached to the deployed image to figure out which container to update.

Try it Yourself

All the source code for this example is on GitHub.

Try running it yourself with Tilt. Make changes to both package.json and server.js and see how Tilt rebuilds only what has changed.

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Building on a Base Image

Building a node_modules Base Image

Adding Live Updates

Try it Yourself

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Building a `node_modules` Base Image