Build a Container with Buildah
Buildah is a tool that facilitates building OCI container images. You can build images from scratch, from a container pulled from a registry, or using a Dockerfile.
To use buildah in the Fedora IoT you will need to install the layered packages:
$ sudo rpm-ostree install buildah
More commonly buildah is used in a developer environment and the resulting containers are then uploaded to a registry for use on any device.
The commands for building a container from a base image are similar to the lines in a Dockerfile. The first step is to pull the base images and create the working container:
$ buildah from fedora fedora-working-container
Add packages to the working container:
$ buildah run fedora-working-container dnf install httpd -y
Create a working directory with some content for a web server:
$ mkdir demo-httpd && cd demo-httpd && echo 'sample container' > index.html
Copy local files into the working container:
$ buildah copy fedora-working-container index.html /var/www/html/index.html
Define the container entrypoint to start the application:
$ buildah config --entrypoint "/usr/sbin/httpd -DFOREGROUND" fedora-working-container
Once configured, save the image:
$ buildah commit fedora-working-container fedora-myhttpd
You can list the local images:
$ buildah images
The buildah images are the same as the podman images. You can run now the container locally with podman:
$ podman run fedora-myhttpd
To make the image available on other devices, push the image to a registry.
The default image has a tag of 'latest'.
Use buildah tag
to add additional tags to the image before pushing to a repository.
To push the image to a local Docker registry:
$ buildah push --tls-verify=false fedora-myhttpd docker://localhost:5000/testuser/fedora-myhttpd:latest
To push to a remote registry provide the correct URL and any required credentials:
$ buildah push --creds testuser:5bbb9990-1234-1234-1234-aaa80066887c fedora-myhttpd docker://testuser/fedora-myhttpd
Skopeo can be used to inspect the results:
$ skopeo inspect --tls-verify=false docker://localhost:5000/testuser/fedora-myhttpd:latest
Test the portability of the container with docker pull
or podman pull
or buildah from
commands.
Learn more about using buildah from:
-
Fedora Magazine: How to build container images with Buildah (2018)
-
buildah.io: Tutorials
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