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: