buildpack introduction

Back in the days, we create dockerfile and provides sets of command such as 

FROM base-image

RUN npm install 

And it all looks really familiar.  Often times, we forgot some command and the app won't be able to run. There are also times - where it took us hours trying to figure out how to install the required component. 

Build packs helps by automatically analyzing your code and then tries to build an image out of it.  Let's say you have a java app and it is using maven. When you run command in your source directory as shown below:- 

 pack build myapp --builder cnbs/sample-builder:jammy

Buildpacks would automatically infer what time of app you're running on and then build a working image ready for deployment or testing

Getting started. 

Install buildpacks 

Then close some samples, git clone https://github.com/buildpacks/samples

For some reason, it only works for java. :) 

cd samples/apps/java-maven

pack build myapp --builder cnbs/sample-builder:jammy

Then run 

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 myapp

You should be able to see this:-

Breaking down what happened 

pack build is the command to build an image. Then follow by myapp - which is the name of your image. 

The builder here - typically means are images that you can use to build with your app. 

You can always run 

pack builder suggest

To see what builder you can use. I still don't have much luck getting buildpack to figure out how to build my dotnet app.