The Old Way To Build Multi Arch Docker Images

Devops

How to build docker images so that they run on both Intel and ARM architectures using the old manifest method. This is also extremly handy if the docker files for the different architectures are different. The modern way of using docker buildx assumes all architectures use the same Dockerfile.

This turorial shows you how to merge two pre-existing docker images build for two different architectures into one tag so that the client can use respective architecture at run time.

Here’s how you do it

  1. Create and push the images for each architecture

    # amd64 architecture
docker build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest-amd64 -f Dockerfile.amd64 .
docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest-amd64

# arm64 image
docker build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest-arm64 -f Dockerfile.arm64 .
docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest-arm64

    Note: Building multi platform docker images is out of scope of this post

  2. Create a manifest and push it to the registry

    docker manifest create $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest --amend $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest-amd64 --amend $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest-arm64
docker manifest push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest

  3. Inspect the combined image

    docker manifest inspect $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest