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In the cookbooks so far, you’ve seen COPY statements with heredocs, and COPY statements with --from options. This page contains a number of recipes which you an add to an existing Dockerfile to incorporate content from outside of the Dockerfile. The way to do this is extremely simple. As an example, the following statements will copy the contents of your current directory (recursively) into the image:
So you would think that with an existing Rails project you could remove a lot of statements and replace them with a single COPY statement. Generally it turns out that the reverse is true. For starters what once was:
Becomes
And then even with that change, when you try to deploy you get a message that looks something like this:

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Versioning

The fix for this is simple. You change your base image. Find occurrences in your Dockerfile that look like:
And replace them with
And many people will do the following to make it even clearer as to what parts may need to be tailored and what parts are fixed:
At this point, your Dockerfile may work, but eagle eyes may spot a warning that looks something like the following:
This means that while the right thing was eventually done, but your build process could be improved to use the right version in the first place. And while node and yarn aren’t as strict or as whiny, installing the versions of these tools that you tested with will minimize surprises. For bundler, the change looks something this:
The process for yarn is similar, and slightly simpler:
For node, four different ways were defined, so there are four different techniques:
  • nodesource: we can change setup_current.x to specify the major node version, for example setup_18.x for the current lts version. It isn’t possible with this technique to specify the minor or patch version. If this is important to you, chose one of the other three alternatives.
  • merging images: just as you can specify FROM ruby:3.2.0-slim you can specify FROM node:18.13.0-slim. It is important to ensure that both images are based on the same operating system (e.g. debian vs alpine), and release (e.g. bullseye vs buster). To make things clearer and avoid problems, include the OS release in the name, for example ruby:3.2.0-slim-bullseye and node:18.13.0-bullseye-slim. Yes, these two projects do order the parts to this name differently.
  • volta: specify the node version on the install, for example: volta install node@18.13.0.
  • node as base: specify the desired node version on the FROM line, but then use a Ruby version manager to install the desired version of Ruby.
A few complete example Dockerfiles demonstrating these concepts:

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dockerignore

While COPY . . is effective, it is a bit too inclusive. For the same reason that you have a .gitignore file you need a .dockerignore file: you don’t want to deploy your tmp files, your test databases, your node_modules directory or your master key. If you don’t already have one, copy your .gitignore file. Now run fly secrets list. If you don’t see RAILS_MASTER_KEY listed there make your master key available to your deployment image by setting a secret. Mac and Linux users can run the following command:
Windows users can run the following command in PowerShell:
You may already have both the .dockerignore file and secret set by this point as fly launch will do both for you.

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binstubs

At this point you are including all of your source minus binaries, irrelevant files, and sensitive files. There still remains one set of files that aren’t binary, are very relevant, but may be platform specific: binstubs. These files start with a she bang, which on Windows machines may contain the letters .exe. And consist of multiple lines where the line separator is \r on Windows vs \n on Linux. And on Linux need to be marked executable in order to run. For these reasons, Windows users may need lines like the following in their Dockerfile:
chmod can be used to set permissions and mark files as executable. sed is a useful tool for making string substitutions in text files. What subset of these lines are needed, or whether these lines are needed at all, can be determined at the time the Dockerfile is generated.

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Recap

What started out as a seemingly simple matter - namely copying your source to the deployment machine - turns out to require considerably more thought than most would initially have thought. As with before, Dockerfiles continue provide a concise way to capture these actions and have them executed reproducibly. That being said, there is a subtle shift in the reaction for many when presented with two Dockerfiles: one that does steps you would expect to be needed in a clear and concise way, and another that does steps that you hadn’t realized were needed. Task specific documentation like these pages are one way to address this need. Another is tools that not only set up Dockerfiles for you initially but help you maintain them as you iterate on your application.