Docker plugin feedback

[aqeelat]

I'm currently trying to move our angular apps into a monorepo. In their individual repos, the apps have this dockerfile:

FROM nginx:alpine
COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
WORKDIR /usr/share/nginx/html
COPY dist/{app-name} .

when a PR is merged to main, we publish and tag with latest, and when a release is created, we tag with stable and the release tag.

I'm trying to replicate this behavior in the nx monorepo, and I faced a couple of issues.

1. build context

The command that gets run is docker build . --tag apps-hello-world and runs from inside the app folder. This means that it cannot access the root dist folder and that we have to change the output path from "dist/apps/hello-world" to "apps/hello-world/dist".

Solution

Changing the command to be docker build . -f apps/hello-world/Dockerfile and running from the root folder.

Workaround

I added this to the plugin args: --build-context dist=../../dist and replaced the COPY line to be

COPY --from=dist /apps/hello-world .

2. multi-tags

I really wish that we can assign multiple tags to the built image. Especially for rolling tags such as edge, latest, stable, or whatever.

3. env variable interpolation

It would be amazing if we can add env variables in nx.json that can then be replaced during ci, with a fallback value. One usage for this is dynamically setting the docker registry url.