Building Container Images¶
Finch leverages Moby's BuildKit to build
container images defined in a
Dockerfile. To interact
with BuildKit you use the finch build
command.
Building a Container Image¶
A sample application called hello-finch is included in the Finch Repository. In this guide we will clone this Finch repository, and build hello-finch.
-
Clone the Finch repository.
git clone https://github.com/runfinch/finch.git
-
Navigate to the hello-finch application.
cd finch/contrib/hello-finch
-
Build hello-finch with the
finch build
. Here we specifying the tag that we want to use for the image, as well as where the build context can be found.finch build --tag hello-finch .
-
You can see the newly build container image in the image store using the
finch image list
command.finch image list
The output shows your new container image, the platform it was built for and the uncompressed size.
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED PLATFORM SIZE BLOB SIZE hello-finch latest 69b2528740fe 2 weeks ago linux/arm64 1.8 MiB 1008.4 KiB
Building a Multi Architecture Container Image¶
By default Finch will build a container image that corresponds to your local
machine, i.e. an x86 container image when running on an Intel machine, an arm64
when running on a Apple Silicon machine. If you wish to build a container image
for an alternative architecture, or multiple architectures at the same time,
then you can use the --platform
flag with finch build
.
-
Once again we will build the hello-finch demo application. If you haven't already, clone the Finch repository.
git clone https://github.com/runfinch/finch.git
-
Navigate to the hello-finch application.
cd finch/contrib/hello-finch
-
Build hello-finch with the
finch build
. Here we specify an alternative architecture with the--platform
flag. Here you could specify a single architecture--platform linux/amd64
or multiple architectures--platform linux/arm64,linux/amd64
.finch build \ --platform linux/arm64,linux/amd64 \ --tag hello-finch \ .
finch build ` --platform linux/arm64,linux/amd64 ` --tag hello-finch ` .
-
You can see both container images in the local image store, with the
finch image list
command.finch image list
Notice how there are 2 images, one for each architecture.
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED PLATFORM SIZE BLOB SIZE hello-finch latest 5874669344b3 2 weeks ago linux/arm64 1.8 MiB 1009.0 KiB hello-finch latest 5874669344b3 2 weeks ago linux/amd64 0.0 B 1.0 MiB
Next Steps¶
In this short section, you learned how to build container images on finch.
- To learn how to run these Container Images navigate to Running Containers
- To learn more about the
finch build
command see the CLI Reference