Boulder-Tools Docker Image Utilities

July 11, 2023 ยท View on GitHub

In CI and our development environment we do not rely on the Go environment of the host machine, and instead use Go installed in a container. To simplify things we separate all of Boulder's build dependencies into its own boulder-tools Docker image.

Setup

To build boulder-tools images, you'll need a Docker set up to do cross-platform builds (we build for both amd64 and arm64 so developers with Apple silicon can use boulder-tools in their dev environment).

Ubuntu steps:

sudo apt-get install qemu binfmt-support qemu-user-static
docker buildx create --use --name=cross

After setup, the output of docker buildx ls should contain an entry like:

cross0  unix:///var/run/docker.sock running linux/amd64, linux/386, linux/arm64, linux/riscv64, linux/ppc64le, linux/s390x, linux/mips64le, linux/mips64, linux/arm/v7, linux/arm/v6

If you see an entry like:

cross0  unix:///var/run/docker.sock stopped

That's probably fine; the instance will be started when you run tag_and_upload.sh (which runs docker buildx build).

macOS steps:

Developers running macOS 12 and later with Docker Desktop 4 and later should be able to use boulder-tools without any pre-setup.

Go Versions

Rather than install multiple versions of Go within the same boulder-tools container we maintain separate images for each Go version we support.

When a new Go version is available we perform several steps to integrate it to our workflow:

  1. We add it to the GO_VERSIONS array in tag_and_upload.sh.
  2. We run the tag_and_upload.sh script to build, tag, and upload a boulder-tools image for each of the GO_VERSIONS.
  3. We update .github/workflows/boulder-ci.yml to add the new image tag(s).
  4. We update the remaining .github/workflows/ yaml files that use a GO_VERSION matrix with the new version of Go.
  5. We update docker-compose.yml to update the default image tag (optional).

After some time when we have spot checked the new Go release and coordinated a staging/prod environment upgrade with the operations team we can remove the old GO_VERSIONS entries, delete their respective build matrix items, and update docker-compose.yml.