The main advantage of using s2i for building reproducible docker images is ease of use for developers. To meet that criteria you, as a builder image author, should be aware of the two basic requirements for the best possible s2i performance. These are:
The build process consists of three fundamental elements which are combined into the
final docker image. These are: source code, s2i scripts, and the builder image. During the
build process s2i must place sources and scripts inside that builder image. To do
so s2i creates a tar file containing the two and then streams that file into the
builder image. Before executing the assemble
script, s2i untars that file and places
its contents into the destination specified with either the --destination
flag or the value of
the io.openshift.s2i.destination
label set in the builder image (the default destination is /tmp
).
If your image does not have either tar
or /bin/sh
the s2i build will perform an additional
docker build to place the source code and scripts into an appropriate image and then run
the normal s2i build.
The following diagram illustrates the build workflow:
* Run build's responsibility is to untar the sources, scripts and (optionally) artifacts
and invoke the assemble
script. If this is the second run after any previous runs with
tar
//bin/sh
errors, it will only run the assemble
script, since both the source and
scripts are already present.
s2i
expects you (the builder image author) to supply the following scripts:
- required:
- optional:
All of the scripts can be written in any programming language, as long as the scripts are executable inside the builder image. The build searches the following locations for these scripts in the following order:
- A script found at the
--scripts-url
URL - A script found in the application source
.s2i/bin
directory - A script found at the default image URL (
io.openshift.s2i.scripts-url
label)
Both the io.openshift.s2i.scripts-url
label specified in the image and --scripts-url
flag
can be supplied in any of the following forms to indicate where the scripts are located:
image://path_to_scripts_dir
- absolute path inside the imagefile://path_to_scripts_dir
- relative or absolute path on the host machinehttp(s)://path_to_scripts_dir
- URL to a directory
NOTE: In the case where the scripts are already placed inside the image (ie when
using --scripts-url
flag or the io.openshift.s2i.scripts-url
with the format
image:///path/in/image
), then the --destination
flag or the io.openshift.s2i.destination
label applies only to sources and artifacts.
The assemble
script is responsible for building the application artifacts from source
and placing them into the appropriate directories inside the image. The workflow for the
assemble
script is:
- Restore build artifacts (in case you want to support incremental builds (if using this, make sure you define save-artifacts) as well.
- Place the application source code in the appropriate location.
- Build any application artifacts.
- Install the artifacts into locations appropriate for running.
In the case you need to assemble the Image using a different user than the runtime user defined
in USER
directive of Dockerfile, you can achive this by the following ways:
- use the
--assemble-user
in cmd line - use the label
io.openshift.s2i.assemble-user
NOTE: All the examples are written in Bash
and it is assumed that the tar contents unpack into the /tmp
directory.
#!/bin/bash
# restore build artifacts
if [ "$(ls /tmp/artifacts/ 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
mv /tmp/artifacts/* $HOME/.
fi
# move the application source
mv /tmp/s2i/src $HOME/src
# build application artifacts
pushd ${HOME}
make all
# install the artifacts
make install
popd
The run
script is responsible for executing your application.
#!/bin/bash
# run the application
/opt/application/run.sh
The save-artifacts
script is responsible for gathering all the dependencies into a tar file and streaming it to the standard output (eg. for Ruby - gems installed by Bundler, for Java - .m2
contents, etc.). The existence of this can speed up the following build processes. Note: it is critical that the save-artifacts
script output only include the tar stream output and nothing else. This is handled by redirecting output to /dev/null in the sample script below.
#!/bin/bash
# Besides the tar command, all other output to standard out must
# be surpressed. Otherwise, the tar stream will be corrupted.
pushd ${HOME} >/dev/null
if [ -d deps ]; then
# all deps contents to tar stream
tar cf - deps
fi
popd >/dev/null
The usage
script is for you (as the builder image author) to inform the user
how to use your image.
#!/bin/bash
# inform the user how to use the image
cat <<EOF
This is a S2I sample builder image.
EOF
The test/run
script is for you (as the builder image author) to create a simple
process to check whether the image is working correctly. The workflow of that process
should be the following:
- Build the image.
- Run the image to verify the
usage
script. - Run the
s2i build
to verifyassemble
script. - (Optional) Run the
s2i build
once more to verifysave-artifacts
script andassemble
's restore artifacts functionality. - Run the image to verify the test application is working.