ARGs in Earthly work similar to ARGs in Dockerfiles, however there are a few differences when it comes to scope. Also, Earthly has a number of built in ARGs that are available to use.
Let's say we wanted to have the option to pass in a tag for our Docker image when we run earthly +docker.
In our +docker target we can create an ARG called tag. In this case, we give it a default value of latest. If we do not provide a default value the default will be an empty string.
Then, down in our SAVE IMAGE command, we are able to reference the ARG with $ followed by the ARG name.
Now we can take advantage of this when we run Earthly.
earthly+docker--tag='my-new-image-tag'
In this case my-new-image-tag will override the default value and become the new tag for our docker image. If we hadn't passed in a value for tag, then the default latest would have been used.
earthly+docker# tag for image will be 'latest'
Passing ARGs in FROM, BUILD, and COPY
We can also pass ARGs when referencing a target inside an Earthfile. Using the FROM and BUILD commands, this looks pretty similar to what we did above on the command line.
docker:
ARG tag='latest'
COPY +build/example .
ENTRYPOINT ["/go-workdir/example"]
SAVE IMAGE go-example:$tag
with-build:
BUILD +docker --tag='my-new-image-tag'
with-from:
FROM +docker --tag='my-new-image-tag'
We can also pass ARGs when using the COPY command, though the syntax is a little different.
build:
ARG version
COPY main.go .
RUN go build -o output/example-$version main.go
SAVE ARTIFACT output/example-$version AS LOCAL local-output/go-example
with-copy:
COPY (+build/example --version='1.0') .
Builtin ARGs
There are a number of builtin ARGs that Earthly offers. You can read about a complete list of them, but for now, let's take a look at how they work.
In order to use Earthly builtin ARGs they need to be pre-declared. Once you do that, you can use them just like any other ARG.
ARG USERARCH
RUN echo $USERARCH
In this case we've declared the ARGUSERARCH which is a builtin that holds the processor architecture the target is being built from.
VERSION 0.8
FROM node:13.10.1-alpine3.11
WORKDIR /js-example
deps:
COPY package.json ./
COPY package-lock.json ./
RUN npm install
# Output these back in case npm install changes them.
SAVE ARTIFACT package.json AS LOCAL ./package.json
SAVE ARTIFACT package-lock.json AS LOCAL ./package-lock.json
build:
FROM +deps
COPY src src
RUN mkdir -p ./dist && cp ./src/index.html ./dist/
RUN npx webpack
SAVE ARTIFACT dist /dist AS LOCAL dist
docker:
FROM +deps
ARG tag='latest'
COPY +build/dist ./dist
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["/js-example/node_modules/http-server/bin/http-server", "./dist"]
SAVE IMAGE js-example:$tag
VERSION 0.8
FROM openjdk:8-jdk-alpine
RUN apk add --update --no-cache gradle
WORKDIR /java-example
deps:
COPY build.gradle ./
RUN gradle build
build:
FROM +deps
COPY src src
RUN gradle build
RUN gradle install
SAVE ARTIFACT build/install/java-example/bin AS LOCAL build/bin
SAVE ARTIFACT build/install/java-example/lib AS LOCAL build/lib
docker:
COPY +build/bin bin
COPY +build/lib lib
ARG tag='latest'
ENTRYPOINT ["/java-example/bin/java-example"]
SAVE IMAGE java-example:$tag