### Important: This repository is in an early development phase and not suitable for practical workloads. It does not compare with `docker build` features yet.
BuildKit is a toolkit for converting source code to build artifacts in an efficient, expressive and repeatable manner.
Key features:
- Automatic garbage collection
- Extendable frontend formats
- Concurrent dependency resolution
- Efficient instruction caching
- Build cache import/export
- Nested build job invocations
- Distributable workers
- Multiple output formats
- Pluggable architecture
Read the proposal from https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/32925
#### Quick start
BuildKit daemon can be built in two different versions: one that uses [containerd](https://github.com/containerd/containerd) for execution and distribution, and a standalone version that doesn't have other dependencies apart from [runc](https://github.com/opencontainers/runc). We are open for adding more backends. `buildd` is a CLI utility for running the gRPC API.
```bash
# buildd daemon (choose one)
go build -o buildd-containerd -tags containerd ./cmd/buildd
go build -o buildd-standalone -tags standalone ./cmd/buildd
# buildctl utility
go build -o buildctl ./cmd/buildctl
```
You can also use `make binaries` that prepares all binaries into the `bin/` directory.
The first thing to test could be to try building BuildKit with BuildKit. BuildKit provides a low-level solver format that could be used by multiple build definitions. Preparation work for making the Dockerfile parser reusable as a frontend is tracked in https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/33492. As no frontends have been integrated yet we currently have to use a client library to generate this low-level definition.
`examples/buildkit*` directory contains scripts that define how to build different configurations of BuildKit and its dependencies using the `client` package. Running one of these script generates a protobuf definition of a build graph. Note that the script itself does not execute any steps of the build.
To start building use `buildctl build` command. The script accepts `--target` flag to choose between `containerd` and `standalone` configurations. In standalone mode BuildKit binaries are built together with `runc`. In containerd mode, the `containerd` binary is built as well from the upstream repo.
`buildctl build` will show interactive progress bar by default while the build job is running. It will also show you the path to the trace file that contains all information about the timing of the individual steps and logs.
Different versions of the example scripts show different ways of describing the build definition for this project to show the capabilities of the library. New versions have been added when new features have become available.
-`./examples/buildkit0` - uses only exec operations, defines a full stage per component.
-`./examples/buildkit1` - cloning git repositories has been separated for extra concurrency.
-`./examples/buildkit2` - uses git sources directly instead of running `git clone`, allowing better performance and much safer caching.
-`./examples/buildkit3` - allows using local source files for separate components eg. `./buildkit3 --runc=local | buildctl build --local runc-src=some/local/path`
During development buildkit is tested with the version of runc that is being used by the containerd repository. Please refer to [runc.md](https://github.com/containerd/containerd/blob/8095244c26fa2daaef850be862e5b1b56d7cec66/RUNC.md) for more information.
