Build Backends

The build backend is a software or service responsible for actually building the images. dib itself is not capable of building images, it delegates this part to the build backend.

dib supports multiple build backends. Currently, available backends are docker and kaniko. You can select the backend to use with the --backend option.

Executor compatibility matrix

Backend	Local	Docker	Kubernetes
Docker	✔	✗	✗
Kaniko	✗	✔	✔

Docker

The docker backend uses Docker behind the scenes, and runs docker build You need to have the Docker CLI installed locally to use this backend.

Authentication

The Docker Daemon requires authentication to pull and push images from private registries. Run the docker login command to authenticate.

Authentication settings are stored in a config.json file located by default in $HOME/.docker/. If you need to provide a different configuration, you can set the DOCKER_CONFIG variable to the path to another directory, which should contain a config.json file.

Remote Daemon

If you want to set a custom docker daemon host, you can set the DOCKER_HOST environment variable. The builds will then run on the remote host instead of using the local Docker daemon.

BuildKit

If available, dib will try to use the BuildKit engine to build images, which is faster than the default Docker build engine.

Kaniko

Kaniko offers a way to build container images inside a container or Kubernetes cluster, without the security tradeoff of running a docker daemon container with host privileges.

BuildKit

As Kaniko must run in a container, it requires Docker when running local builds as it uses the docker executor.

See the kaniko section in the configuration reference.