Creating a tiny Docker image of a Rust project

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I am building a toy project in Rust to help me learn how to deploy things in AWS. I’m considering using Elastic Beanstalk (AWS’s platform-as-a-service) and also Kubernetes. Both of these support deploying via Docker containers, so I am learning how to package a Rust executable as a Docker image.

My program is a small web site that uses Redis as a back end database. It consists of some Rust code and a couple of static files.

Because Rust has good support for building executables with very few dependencies, we can actually build a Docker image with almost nothing in it, except my program and the static files.

Thanks to Alexander Brand’s blog post How to Package Rust Applications Into Minimal Docker Containers I was able to build a Docker image that:

  1. Is very small
  2. Does not take too long to build

The main concern for making the build faster is that we don’t download and build all the dependencies every time. To achieve that we make sure there is a layer in the Docker build process that includes all the dependencies being built, and is not re-built when we only change our source code.

Here is the Dockerfile I ended up with:

# 1: Build the exe
FROM rust:1.42 as builder
WORKDIR /usr/src
Creating a tiny Docker image of a Rust project
# 1a: Prepare for static linking
RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get dist-upgrade -y && \
    apt-get install -y musl-tools && \
    rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

# 1b: Download and compile Rust dependencies (and store as a separate Docker layer)
RUN USER=root cargo new myprogram
WORKDIR /usr/src/myprogram
COPY Cargo.toml Cargo.lock ./
RUN cargo install --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl --path .

# 1c: Build the exe using the actual source code
COPY src ./src
RUN cargo install --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl --path .

# 2: Copy the exe and extra files ("static") to an empty Docker image
FROM scratch
COPY --from=builder /usr/local/cargo/bin/myprogram .
COPY static .
USER 1000
CMD ["./myprogram"]

The FROM rust:1.42 as build line uses the newish Docker feature multi-stage builds – we create one Docker image (“builder”) just to build the code, and then copy the resulting executable into the final Docker image.

In order to allow us to build a stand-alone executable that does not depend on the standard libraries in the operating system, we use the “musl” target, which is designed to statically linked.

The final Docker image produced is pretty much the same size as the release build of myprogram, and the build is fast, so long as I don’t change the dependencies in Cargo.toml.

A couple more tips to make the build faster:

1. Use a .dockerignore file. Here is mine:

/target/
/.git/

2. Use Docker BuildKit, by running the build like this:

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build  .

Build with a different Java version (e.g. 11) using Docker

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

To spin up a temporary environment with a different Java version without touching your real environment, try this Docker command:

docker run -i -t --mount "type=bind,src=$PWD,dst=/code" openjdk:11-jdk bash

(Change “11-jdk” to the version you want as listed on the README.)

Then you can build the code inside the current directory something like this:

cd code
./gradlew test

Or similar for other build tools, although you may need to install them first.

Run bash inside any version of Linux using Docker

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

Docker is useful for some things, and not as useful as you think for others.

Here’s something massively useful: get a throwaway bash prompt inside any version of any Linux distribution in one command:

docker run -i -t --mount "type=bind,src=$HOME/Desktop,dst=/Desktop" ubuntu:18.10 bash

This command downloads a recent Ubuntu 18.10 image, mounts my desktop as /Desktop in the container, and gives me a bash prompt. From here I can install any packages I want and then use them.

For example, today I used it to decrypt a file that was encrypted with a cipher my main OS did not have a package for.

When I exit bash, the container stops and I can find it with docker ps -a then remove it with docker rm. To really clean up I can find the downloaded images with docker image ls and remove them with docker image rm.