kaniko - Build Images In Kubernetes

kaniko is a tool to build container images from a Dockerfile, inside a container or Kubernetes cluster.

kaniko doesn't depend on a Docker daemon and executes each command within a Dockerfile completely in userspace. This enables building container images in environments that can't easily or securely run a Docker daemon, such as a standard Kubernetes cluster.

We're currently in the process of building kaniko, so as of now it isn't production ready. Please let us know if you have any feature requests or find any bugs!

How does kaniko work?

The kaniko executor image is responsible for building an image from a Dockerfile and pushing it to a registry. Within the executor image, we extract the filesystem of the base image (the FROM image in the Dockerfile). We then execute the commands in the Dockerfile, snapshotting the filesystem in userspace after each one. After each command, we append a layer of changed files to the base image (if there are any) and update image metadata.

Known Issues

The majority of Dockerfile commands can be executed with kaniko, but we're still working on supporting the following commands:

SHELL
HEALTHCHECK
STOPSIGNAL
ARG

Multi-Stage Dockerfiles are also unsupported currently, but will be ready soon.

kaniko Build Contexts

kaniko supports local directories and GCS buckets as build contexts. To specify a local directory, pass in the --context flag as an argument to the executor image. To specify a GCS bucket, pass in the --bucket flag. The GCS bucket should contain a compressed tar of the build context called context.tar.gz, which kaniko will unpack and use as the build context.

To create context.tar.gz, run the following command:

tar -C <path to build context> -zcvf context.tar.gz .

Or, you can use skaffold to create context.tar.gz by running

skaffold docker context

We can copy over the compressed tar to a GCS bucket with gsutil:

gsutil cp context.tar.gz gs://<bucket name>

Running kaniko in a Kubernetes cluster

Requirements:

Standard Kubernetes cluster
Kubernetes Secret

To run kaniko in a Kubernetes cluster, you will need a standard running Kubernetes cluster and a Kubernetes secret, which contains the auth required to push the final image.

To create the secret, first you will need to create a service account in the Google Cloud Console project you want to push the final image to, with Storage Admin permissions. You can download a JSON key for this service account, and rename it kaniko-secret.json. To create the secret, run:

kubectl create secret generic kaniko-secret --from-file=<path to kaniko-secret.json>

The Kubernetes Pod spec should look similar to this, with the args parameters filled in:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: kaniko
spec:
  containers:
  - name: kaniko
    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest
    args: ["--dockerfile=<path to Dockerfile>",
            "--bucket=<GCS bucket>",
            "--destination=<gcr.io/$PROJECT/$IMAGE:$TAG>"]
    volumeMounts:
      - name: kaniko-secret
        mountPath: /secret
    env:
      - name: GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
        value: /secret/kaniko-secret.json
  restartPolicy: Never
  volumes:
    - name: kaniko-secret
      secret:
        secretName: kaniko-secret

This example pulls the build context from a GCS bucket. To use a local directory build context, you could consider using configMaps to mount in small build contexts.

Running kaniko in Google Container Builder

To run kaniko in GCB, add it to your build config as a build step:

steps:
  - name: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest
    args: ["--dockerfile=<path to Dockerfile>",
           "--context=<path to build context>",
           "--destination=<gcr.io/$PROJECT/$IMAGE:$TAG>"]

kaniko will build and push the final image in this build step.

Running kaniko locally

Requirements:

Docker
gcloud

We can run the kaniko executor image locally in a Docker daemon to build and push an image from a Dockerfile.

First, we want to load the executor image into the Docker daemon by running

make images

To run kaniko in Docker, run the following command:

./run_in_docker.sh <path to Dockerfile> <path to build context> <destination of final image>

Comparison with Other Tools

Similar tools include:

All of these tools build container images with different approaches.

img can perform as a non root user from within a container, but requires that the img container has RawProc access to create nested containers. kaniko does not actually create nested containers, so it does not require RawProc access.

orca-build depends on runC to build images from Dockerfiles, which can not run inside a container. kaniko doesn't use runC so it doesn't require the use of kernel namespacing techniques.

buildah requires the same privileges as a Docker daemon does to run, while kaniko runs without any special privileges or permissions.

FTL and Bazel aim to achieve the fastest possible creation of Docker images for a subset of images. These can be thought of as a special-case "fast path" that can be used in conjunction with the support for general Dockerfiles kaniko provides.

Community

kaniko-users Google group