Docker strategies

These are the strategies we use for managing docker images in the digitalmarketplace DockerHub repo

Automatically managed

Most of our docker images are automatically managed by Jenkins jobs that run when a particular repo has changes merged to master.

As part of the release-pipeline job these include:

  • api

  • search-api

  • antivirus-api

  • user-frontend

  • briefs-frontend

  • brief-responses-frontend

  • buyer-frontend

  • supplier-frontend

  • admin-frontend

  • router

As part of the build-scripts job:

  • scripts

The above jobs use a build-image job when code is merged to master in their respective git repositories.

The build-image job:

  1. Checks out the master branch of the repository

  2. Builds the docker image from the Dockerfile in the repo

  3. Tags the docker image with the git short hash

  4. Pushes the tag

  5. Tags and pushes the build as latest

The build-scripts job is a good example of how to add a docker image for a repo that will then be automatically managed.

  1. Add the Dockerfile to the base of the digitalmarketplace-<repo-name> repo

  2. Create a repo for the docker image on dockerhub like digitalmarketplace/<repo-name> (find the credentials in digitalmarketplace-credentials/pass/docker.com/org-owner)

  3. Add a jenkins job that polls github for changes to digitalmarketplace/<repo-name>:master which runs the build-image job

Makefile managed

We have three base images in the digitalmarketplace-docker-base repository:

These are updated using make commands found in the repo’s Makefile.

You can find out more about how to update them in the repo’s README.

Manually managed

Note

it is worth reviewing whether you can incorporate a new docker image in to any of the other strategies before using a Dockerfile managed docker image. It is likely that your code should be a new repo if it requires its own Dockerfile. In that case it is possible to use the automatically managed strategy.

There are a couple of Docker images we create and use that do not fit into any of the categories above. These processes are considered technical debt however; it is an ongoing issue to look at better tools for this kind of thing.

For database backups, we use a digitalmarketplace/db-backup docker image. This is kept in the digitalmarketplace-aws repo Dockerfile, and updated by a single Makefile task, deploy-db-backup-app.

You can find out more about the backups in the Database backups section of the manual.