Building Artifacts with CNCF Buildpacks

This page describes building Skaffold artifacts with buildpacks. Buildpacks enable building language-based containers from source code, without the need for a Dockerfile.

Before you begin

First, you will need to have Skaffold and a Kubernetes cluster set up. To learn more about how to set up Skaffold and a Kubernetes cluster, see the quickstart docs.

To use buildpacks with Skaffold, please install the following additional tools:

• pack
• docker

Tutorial - Hello World in Go

To walk through a buildpacks tutorial, see our buildpacks example.

Adding Buildpacks to Your Skaffold Project

To use buildpacks with your own project, you must choose a buildpack image to build your artifacts. To see a list of available buildpacks, run:

$ pack suggest-builders

Choose a buildpack from the list, making sure your chosen image can detect the runtime your project is written in. Set your default buildpack:

$ pack set-default-builder <insert buildpack image here>

Now, configure your Skaffold config to build artifacts with buildpacks. To do this, we will take advantage of the custom builder in Skaffold.

First, add a build.sh file which Skaffold will call to build artifacts:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
images=$(echo $IMAGES | tr " " "\n")

for image in $images
do
    pack build $image
    if $PUSH_IMAGE
    then
        docker push $image
    fi
done

Then, configure artifacts in your skaffold.yaml to build with build.sh:

apiVersion: skaffold/v1beta13
kind: Config
build:
  artifacts:
    - image: gcr.io/k8s-skaffold/image
      custom:
        buildCommand: build.sh
        dependencies:
          paths:
            - .
deploy:
  kubectl:
    manifests:
      - ./k8s/**

List the file dependencies for each artifact; in the example above, Skaffold watches all files in the build context. For more information about listing dependencies for custom artifacts, see the documentation here.

You can check buildpacks are properly configured by running skaffold build. This command should build the artifacts and exit successfully.