Build small Go Program Docker Image

Let’s start with this small Go program:

package main

import "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"

func main() {
    r := gin.Default()
    r.GET("/ping", func(c *gin.Context) {
        c.JSON(200, gin.H{
            "message": "pong",
        })
    })
    r.Run() // listen and serve on 0.0.0.0:8080 (for windows "localhost:8080")
}

We will use go modules to manage dependencies:

go mod init rayed.com/server
go mod tidy

You can run it without installing Go on your machine using Docker:

docker run --rm -it   -v `pwd`:/app -w /app golang:1.16   go run server.go

Building a Docker Image

Next step we will make a custom Docker image from our application, we would need a Dockerfile like this:

From golang:1.16

WORKDIR /go/src/app
COPY . .

RUN go build -o server server.go

CMD ["./server"]

To build it:

docker build  -t myapp .

After having our own image it is time to run it:

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 myapp 

Building a Small Docker Image

If we check the size of our image:

$ docker images myapp
REPOSITORY   TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
myapp        latest    f0d7b156c7e1   3 minutes ago   866MB

WOW! 866MB for a small program!

The problem is that we based our image on Golang docker image, which contains many things including the compilers.

To solve this issue, we can utilize multi-stage build, one stage for building, another for the image it self.

To do it we change the Dockerfile:

# Stage 1: compile the program
FROM golang:1.16 as build-stage
WORKDIR /app
COPY go.* .
RUN go mod download
COPY . .
RUN go build -o server server.go

# Stage 2: build the image
FROM alpine:latest  
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates libc6-compat
WORKDIR /app/
COPY --from=build-stage /app/server .
EXPOSE 8080
CMD ["./server"]  

Now let’s build the image using and check its size:

$ docker build  -t myapp .
$ docker images myapp
REPOSITORY   TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE
myapp        latest    ded25480ca29   46 seconds ago   15.6MB

The docker image went from 866 MB to only 15.6 MB!