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Build containers in GitLab CI with buildah

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Buildah Containers Docker Gitlab Linux Podman
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My team at Red Hat depends heavily on GitLab CI and we build containers often to run all kinds of tests. Fortunately, GitLab offers up CI to build containers and a container registry in every repository to hold the containers we build.

This is really handy because it keeps everything together in one place: your container build scripts, your container build infrastructure, and the registry that holds your containers. Better yet, you can put multiple types of containers underneath a single git repository if you need to build containers based on different Linux distributions.

Building with Docker in GitLab CI #

By default, GitLab offers up a Docker builder that works just fine. The CI system clones your repository, builds your containers and pushes them wherever you want. There’s even a simple CI YAML file that does everything end-to-end for you.

However, I have two issues with the Docker builder:

  • Larger images: The Docker image layering is handy, but the images end up being a bit larger, especially if you don’t do a little cleanup in each stage.

  • Additional service: It requires an additional service inside the CI runner for the dind (“Docker in Docker”) builder. This has caused some CI delays for me several times.

Building with buildah in GitLab CI #

On my local workstation, I use podman and buildah all the time to build, run, and test containers. These tools are handy because I don’t need to remember to start the Docker daemon each time I want to mess with a container. I also don’t need sudo.

All of my containers are stored beneath my home directory. That’s good for keeping disk space in check, but it’s especially helpful on shared servers since each user has their own unique storage. My container pulls and builds won’t disrupt anyone else’s work on the server and their work won’t disrupt mine.

Finally, buildah offers some nice options out of the box. First, when you build a container with buildah bud, you end up with only three layers by default:

  1. Original OS layer (example: fedora:30)
  2. Everything you added on top of the OS layer
  3. Tiny bit of metadata

This is incredibly helpful if you use package managers like dnf, apt, and yum that download a bunch of metadata before installing packages. You would normally have to clear the metadata carefully for the package manager so that your container wouldn’t grow in size. Buildah takes care of that by squashing all the stuff you add into one layer.

Of course, if you want to be more aggressive, buildah offers the --squash option which squashes the whole image down into one layer. This can be helpful if disk space is at a premium and you change the layers often.

Getting started #

I have a repository called os-containers in GitLab that maintains fully updated containers for Fedora 29 and 30. The .gitlab-ci.yml file calls build.sh for two containers: fedora29 and fedora30. Open the build.sh file and follow along here:

# Use vfs with buildah. Docker offers overlayfs as a default, but buildah
# cannot stack overlayfs on top of another overlayfs filesystem.
export STORAGE_DRIVER=vfs

First off, we need to tell buildah to use the vfs storage driver. Docker uses overlayfs by default and stacking overlay filesystems will definitely lead to problems. Buildah won’t let you try it.

# Write all image metadata in the docker format, not the standard OCI format.
# Newer versions of docker can handle the OCI format, but older versions, like
# the one shipped with Fedora 30, cannot handle the format.
export BUILDAH_FORMAT=docker

By default, buildah uses the oci container format. This sometimes causes issues with older versions of Docker that don’t understand how to parse that type of metadata. By setting the format to docker, we’re using a format that almost all container runtimes can understand.

# Log into GitLab's container repository.
export REGISTRY_AUTH_FILE=${HOME}/auth.json
echo "$CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD" | buildah login -u "$CI_REGISTRY_USER" --password-stdin $CI_REGISTRY

Here we set a path for the auth.json that contains the credentials for talking to the container repository. We also use buildah to authenticate to GitLab’s built-in container repository. GitLab automatically exports these variables for us (and hides them in the job output), so we can use them here.

buildah bud -f builds/${IMAGE_NAME} -t ${IMAGE_NAME} .

We’re now building the container and storing it temporarily as the bare image name, such as fedora30. This is roughly equivalent to docker build.

CONTAINER_ID=$(buildah from ${IMAGE_NAME})
buildah commit --squash $CONTAINER_ID $FQ_IMAGE_NAME

Now we are making a reference to our container with buildah from and using that reference to squash that container down into a single layer. This keeps the container as small as possible.

The commit step also tags the resulting image using our fully qualified image name (in this case, it’s registry.gitlab.com/majorhayden/os-containers/fedora30:latest)

buildah push ${FQ_IMAGE_NAME}

This is the same as docker push. There’s not much special to see here.

Maintaining containers #

GitLab allows you to take things to the next level with CI schedules. In my repository, there is a schedule to build my containers once a day to catch the latest updates. I use these containers a lot and they need to be up to date before I can run tests.

If the container build fails for some reason, GitLab will send me an email to let me know.

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