One of the biggest challenges of developing and maintaining cloud-native applications at the enterprise level is having a consistent experience through the entire development lifecycle. This process is even harder for remote companies with distributed teams working on different platforms, with different setups, and asynchronous communication. 

At Kinsta, we have projects of all sizes for application hosting, database hosting, and managed WordPress hosting. We need to provide a consistent, reliable, and scalable solution that allows:

• Developers and quality assurance teams, regardless of their operating systems, to create a straightforward and minimal setup for developing and testing features.
• DevOps, SysOps, and Infrastructure teams to configure and maintain staging and production environments.

Overcoming the challenge of developing cloud-native applications on a distributed team

At Kinsta, we rely heavily on Docker for this consistent experience at every step, from development to production. In this article, we’ll walk you through:

• How to leverage Docker Desktop to increase developers’ productivity.
• How we build Docker images and push them to Google Container Registry via CI pipelines with CircleCI and GitHub Actions.
• How we use CD pipelines to promote incremental changes to production using Docker images, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Deploy.
• How the QA team seamlessly uses prebuilt Docker images in different environments.

Using Docker Desktop to improve the developer experience

Running an application locally requires developers to meticulously prepare the environment, install all the dependencies, set up servers and services, and make sure they are properly configured. When you run multiple applications, this approach can be cumbersome, especially when it comes to complex projects with multiple dependencies. And, when you introduce multiple contributors with multiple operating systems, chaos is installed. To prevent this, we use Docker.

With Docker, you can declare the environment configurations, install the dependencies, and build images with everything where it should be. Anyone, anywhere, with any OS can use the same images and have exactly the same experience as anyone else.

Declare your configuration with Docker Compose

To get started, you need to create a Docker Compose file, docker-compose.yml. This is a declarative configuration file written in YAML format that tells Docker your application’s desired state. Docker uses this information to set up the environment for your application.

Docker Compose files come in handy when you have more than one container running and there are dependencies between containers.

To create your docker-compose.yml file:

1. Start by choosing an image as the base for our application. Search on Docker Hub to find a Docker image that already contains your app’s dependencies. Make sure to use a specific image tag to avoid errors. Using the latest tag can cause unforeseen errors in your application. You can use multiple base images for multiple dependencies — for example, one for PostgreSQL and one for Redis.
2. Use volumes to persist data on your host if you need to. Persisting data on the host machine helps you avoid losing data if Docker containers are deleted or if you have to recreate them.
3. Use networks to isolate your setup to avoid network conflicts with the host and other containers. It also helps your containers to find and communicate with each other easily.

Bringing it all together, we have a docker-compose.yml that looks like this:

version: '3.8'

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:14.7-alpine3.17
    hostname: mk_db
    restart: on-failure
    ports:
      - ${DB_PORT:-5432}:5432
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: ${DB_USER:-user}
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD:-password}
      POSTGRES_DB: ${DB_NAME:-main}
    networks:
      - mk_network
  redis:
    image: redis:6.2.11-alpine3.17
    hostname: mk_redis
    restart: on-failure
    ports:
      - ${REDIS_PORT:-6379}:6379
    networks:
      - mk_network
      
volumes:
  db_data:

networks:
  mk_network:
    name: mk_network

Containerize the application

Build a Docker image for your application

To begin, we need to build a Docker image using a Dockerfile, and then call that from docker-compose.yml.

Follow these five steps to create your Dockerfile file:

1. Start by choosing an image as a base. Use the smallest base image that works for the app. Usually, alpine images are minimal with nearly zero extra packages installed. You can start with an alpine image and build on top of that:

   docker
   FROM node:18.15.0-alpine3.17

2. Sometimes you need to use a specific CPU architecture to avoid conflicts. For example, suppose that you use an arm64-based processor but you need to build an amd64 image. You can do that by specifying the -- platform in Dockerfile:

   docker
   FROM --platform=amd64 node:18.15.0-alpine3.17

3. Define the application directory and install the dependencies and copy the output to your root directory:

    docker
    WORKDIR /opt/app 
    COPY package.json yarn.lock ./ 
    RUN yarn install 
    COPY . .

4. Call the Dockerfile from docker-compose.yml:

     services:
      ...redis
      ...db
      
      app:
        build:
          context: .
          dockerfile: Dockerfile
        platforms:
          - "linux/amd64"
        command: yarn dev
        restart: on-failure
        ports:
          - ${PORT:-4000}:${PORT:-4000}
        networks:
          - mk_network
        depends_on:
          - redis
          - db

5. Implement auto-reload so that when you change something in the source code, you can preview your changes immediately without having to rebuild the application manually. To do that, build the image first, then run it in a separate service:

     services:
      ... redis
      ... db
      
      build-docker:
        image: myapp
        build:
          context: .
          dockerfile: Dockerfile
      app:
        image: myapp
        platforms:
          - "linux/amd64"
        command: yarn dev
        restart: on-failure
        ports:
          - ${PORT:-4000}:${PORT:-4000}
        volumes:
          - .:/opt/app
          - node_modules:/opt/app/node_modules
        networks:
          - mk_network
        depends_on:
          - redis
          - db
          - build-docker

Pro tip: Note that node_modules is also mounted explicitly to avoid platform-specific issues with packages. This means that, instead of using the node_modules on the host, the Docker container uses its own but maps it on the host in a separate volume.

Incrementally build the production images with continuous integration 

The majority of our apps and services use CI/CD for deployment, and Docker plays an important role in the process. Every change in the main branch immediately triggers a build pipeline through either GitHub Actions or CircleCI. The general workflow is simple: It installs the dependencies, runs the tests, builds the Docker image, and pushes it to Google Container Registry (or Artifact Registry). In this article, we’ll describe the build step.

Building the Docker images

We use multi-stage builds for security and performance reasons.

Stage 1: Builder

In this stage, we copy the entire code base with all source and configuration, install all dependencies, including dev dependencies, and build the app. It creates a dist/ folder and copies the built version of the code there. This image is way too large, however, with a huge set of footprints to be used for production. Also, as we use private NPM registries, we use our private NPM_TOKEN in this stage as well. So, we definitely don’t want this stage to be exposed to the outside world. The only thing we need from this stage is the dist/ folder.

Stage 2: Production

Most people use this stage for runtime because it is close to what we need to run the app. However, we still need to install production dependencies, and that means we leave footprints and need the NPM_TOKEN. So, this stage is still not ready to be exposed. Here, you should also note the yarn cache clean on line 19. That tiny command cuts our image size by up to 60 percent.

Stage 3: Runtime

The last stage needs to be as slim as possible with minimal footprints. So, we just copy the fully baked app from production and move on. We put all those yarn and NPM_TOKEN stuff behind and only run the app.

This is the final Dockerfile.production:

docker
# Stage 1: build the source code 
FROM node:18.15.0-alpine3.17 as builder 
WORKDIR /opt/app 
COPY package.json yarn.lock ./ 
RUN yarn install 
COPY . . 
RUN yarn build 

# Stage 2: copy the built version and build the production dependencies FROM node:18.15.0-alpine3.17 as production 
WORKDIR /opt/app 
COPY package.json yarn.lock ./ 
RUN yarn install --production && yarn cache clean 
COPY --from=builder /opt/app/dist/ ./dist/ 

# Stage 3: copy the production ready app to runtime 
FROM node:18.15.0-alpine3.17 as runtime 
WORKDIR /opt/app 
COPY --from=production /opt/app/ . 
CMD ["yarn", "start"]

Note that, for all the stages, we start copying package.json and yarn.lock files first, installing the dependencies, and then copying the rest of the code base. The reason for this is that Docker builds each command as a layer on top of the previous one, and each build could use the previous layers if available and only build the new layers for performance purposes. 

Let’s say you have changed something in src/services/service1.ts without touching the packages. That means the first four layers of the builder stage are untouched and could be reused. This approach makes the build process incredibly faster.

Pushing the app to Google Container Registry through CircleCI pipelines

There are several ways to build a Docker image in CircleCI pipelines. In our case, we chose to use circleci/gcp-gcr orbs:

Minimum configuration is needed to build and push our app, thanks to Docker.

executors:
  docker-executor:
    docker:
      - image: cimg/base:2023.03
orbs:
  gcp-gcr: circleci/gcp-gcr@0.15.1
jobs:
  ...
  deploy:
    description: Build & push image to Google Artifact Registry
    executor: docker-executor
    steps:
      ...
      - gcp-gcr/build-image:
          image: my-app
          dockerfile: Dockerfile.production
          tag: ${CIRCLE_SHA1:0:7},latest
      - gcp-gcr/push-image:
          image: my-app
          tag: ${CIRCLE_SHA1:0:7},latest

Pushing the app to Google Container Registry through GitHub Actions

As an alternative to CircleCI, we can use GitHub Actions to deploy the application continuously.

We set up gcloud and build and push the Docker image to gcr.io:

jobs:
  setup-build:
    name: Setup, Build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Get Image Tag
      run: |
        echo "TAG=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)" >> $GITHUB_ENV

    - uses: google-github-actions/setup-gcloud@master
      with:
        service_account_key: ${{ secrets.GCP_SA_KEY }}
        project_id: ${{ secrets.GCP_PROJECT_ID }}

    - run: |-
        gcloud --quiet auth configure-docker

    - name: Build
      run: |-
        docker build \
          --tag "gcr.io/${{ secrets.GCP_PROJECT_ID }}/my-app:$TAG" \
          --tag "gcr.io/${{ secrets.GCP_PROJECT_ID }}/my-app:latest" \
          .

    - name: Push
      run: |-
        docker push "gcr.io/${{ secrets.GCP_PROJECT_ID }}/my-app:$TAG"
        docker push "gcr.io/${{ secrets.GCP_PROJECT_ID }}/my-app:latest"

With every small change pushed to the main branch, we build and push a new Docker image to the registry.

Deploying changes to Google Kubernetes Engine using Google Delivery Pipelines

Having ready-to-use Docker images for each and every change also makes it easier to deploy to production or roll back in case something goes wrong. We use Google Kubernetes Engine to manage and serve our apps, and we use Google Cloud Deploy and Delivery Pipelines for our continuous deployment process.

When the Docker image is built after each small change (with the CI pipeline shown previously), we take one step further and deploy the change to our dev cluster using gcloud. Let’s look at that step in CircleCI pipeline:

- run:
    name: Create new release
    command: gcloud deploy releases create release-${CIRCLE_SHA1:0:7} --delivery-pipeline my-del-pipeline --region $REGION --annotations commitId=$CIRCLE_SHA1 --images my-app=gcr.io/${PROJECT_ID}/my-app:${CIRCLE_SHA1:0:7}

This step triggers a release process to roll out the changes in our dev Kubernetes cluster. After testing and getting the approvals, we promote the change to staging and then production. This action is all possible because we have a slim isolated Docker image for each change that has almost everything it needs. We only need to tell the deployment which tag to use.

How the Quality Assurance team benefits from this process

The QA team needs mostly a pre-production cloud version of the apps to be tested. However, sometimes they need to run a prebuilt app locally (with all the dependencies) to test a certain feature. In these cases, they don’t want or need to go through all the pain of cloning the entire project, installing npm packages, building the app, facing developer errors, and going over the entire development process to get the app up and running.

Now that everything is already available as a Docker image on Google Container Registry, all the QA team needs is a service in Docker compose file:

services:
  ...redis
  ...db
  
  app:
    image: gcr.io/${PROJECT_ID}/my-app:latest
    restart: on-failure
    ports:
      - ${PORT:-4000}:${PORT:-4000}
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=production
      - REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379
      - DATABASE_URL=postgresql://${DB_USER:-user}:${DB_PASSWORD:-password}@db:5432/main
    networks:
      - mk_network
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - db

With this service, the team can spin up the application on their local machines using Docker containers by running:

docker compose up

This is a huge step toward simplifying testing processes. Even if QA decides to test a specific tag of the app, they can easily change the image tag on line 6 and re-run the Docker compose command. Even if they decide to compare different versions of the app simultaneously, they can easily achieve that with a few tweaks. The biggest benefit is to keep our QA team away from developer challenges.

Advantages of using Docker

• Almost zero footprints for dependencies: If you ever decide to upgrade the version of Redis or PostgreSQL, you can just change one line and re-run the app. There’s no need to change anything on your system. Additionally, if you have two apps that both need Redis (maybe even with different versions) you can have both running in their own isolated environment, without any conflicts with each other.
• Multiple instances of the app: There are many cases where we need to run the same app with a different command, such as initializing the DB, running tests, watching DB changes, or listening to messages. In each of these cases, because we already have the built image ready, we just add another service to the Docker compose file with a different command, and we’re done.
• Easier testing environment: More often than not, you just need to run the app. You don’t need the code, the packages, or any local database connections. You only want to make sure the app works properly, or need a running instance as a backend service while you’re working on your own project. That could also be the case for QA, Pull Request reviewers, or even UX folks who want to make sure their design has been implemented properly. Our Docker setup makes it easy for all of them to take things going without having to deal with too many technical issues.

Learn more

• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.
• Visit the Kinsta site to learn about the cloud platform.

Stable Diffusion has gained significant attention for its ability to generate highly detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, thereby opening up new possibilities in areas such as creative design, visual storytelling, and content generation. With its open source nature and accessibility, Stable Diffusion has become a go-to tool for many researchers and developers seeking to harness the power of deep learning. 

In this article, we will explore how to optimize deep learning workflows by leveraging Stable Diffusion alongside Docker on WSL 2, enabling seamless and efficient experimentation with this cutting-edge technology.

In this comprehensive guide, we will walk through the process of setting up the Stable Diffusion WebUI Docker, which includes enabling WSL 2 and installing Docker Desktop. You will learn how to download the required code from GitHub and initialize it using Docker Compose. 

The guide provides instructions on adding additional models and managing the system, covering essential tasks such as reloading the UI and determining the ideal location for saving image output. Troubleshooting steps and tips for monitoring hardware and GPU usage are also included, ensuring a smooth and efficient experience with Stable Diffusion WebUI (Figure 1).

Why use Docker Desktop for Stable Diffusion?

In the realm of image-based generative AI, setting up an effective execution and development environment on a Windows PC can present particular challenges. These challenges arise due to differences in software dependencies, compatibility issues, and the need for specialized tools and frameworks. Docker Desktop emerges as a powerful solution to tackle these challenges by providing a containerization platform that ensures consistency and reproducibility across different systems.

By leveraging Docker Desktop, we can create an isolated environment that encapsulates all the necessary components and dependencies required for image-based generative AI workflows. This approach eliminates the complexities associated with manual software installations, conflicting library versions, and system-specific configurations.

Using Stable Diffusion WebUI

The Stable Diffusion WebUI is a browser interface that is built upon the Gradio library, offering a convenient way to interact with and explore the capabilities of Stable Diffusion. Gradio is a powerful Python library that simplifies the process of creating interactive interfaces for machine learning models.

Setting up the Stable Diffusion WebUI environment can be a tedious and time-consuming process, requiring multiple steps for environment construction. However, a convenient solution is available in the form of Stable Diffusion WebUI Docker project. This Docker image eliminates the need for manual setup by providing a preconfigured environment.

If you’re using Windows and have Docker Desktop installed, you can effortlessly build and run the environment using the docker-compose command. You don’t have to worry about preparing libraries or dependencies beforehand because everything is encapsulated within the container.

You might wonder whether there are any problems because it’s a container. I was anxious before I started using it, but I haven’t had any particular problems so far. The images, models, variational autoencoders (VAEs), and other data that are generated are shared (bind mounted) with my Windows machine, so I can exchange files simply by dragging them in Explorer or in the Files of the target container on Docker Desktop. 

The most trouble I had was when I disabled the extension without backing it up, and in a moment blew away about 50GB of data that I had spent half a day training. (This is a joke!)

Architecture

I’ve compiled a relatively simple procedure to start with Stable Diffusion using Docker Desktop on Windows. 

Prerequisites:

• Windows 10 Pro, 21H2 Build 19044.2846
• 16GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
• WSL 2 (Ubuntu)
• Docker Desktop 4.18.0 (104112)

Setup with Docker Compose

We will use the WebUI called AUTOMATIC1111 to utilize Stable Diffusion this time. The environment for these will be constructed using Docker Compose. The main components are shown in Figure 2.

The configuration of Docker Compose is defined in docker-compose.yml. We are using a Compose extension called x-base_service to describe the major components common to each service.

To start, there are settings for bind mount between the host and the container, including /data, which loads modes, and /output, which outputs images. Then, we make the container recognize the GPU by loading the NVIDIA driver.

Furthermore, the service named sd-auto:58 runs AUTOMATIC1111, WebUI for Stable Diffusion, within the container. Because there is a port mapping (TCP:7860), between the host and the container in the aforementioned common service settings, it is possible to access from the browser on the host side to the inside of the container.

Getting Started

Prerequisite

WSL 2 must be activated and Docker Desktop installed.

On the first execution, it downloads 12GB of Stable Diffusion 1.5 models, etc. The Web UI cannot be used until this download is complete. Depending on your connection, it may take a long time until the first startup.

Downloading the code

First, download the Stable Diffusion WebUI Docker code from GitHub. If you download it as a ZIP, click Code > Download ZIP and the stable-diffusion-webui-docker-master.zip file will be downloaded (Figure 3). 

Unzip the file in a convenient location. When you expand it, you will find a folder named stable-diffusion-webui-docker-master. Open the command line or similar and run the docker compose command inside it.

Or, if you have an environment where you can use Git, such as Git for Windows, it’s quicker to download it as follows:

git clone https://github.com/AbdBarho/stable-diffusion-webui-docker.git

In this case, the folder name is stable-diffusion-webui-docker. Move it with cd stable-diffusion-webui-docker.

Supplementary information for those familiar with Docker

If you just want to get started, you can skip this section.

By default, the timezone is UTC. To adjust the time displayed in the log and the date of the directory generated under output/txt2img to Japan time, add TZ=Asia/Tokyo to the environment variables of the auto service. Specifically, add the following description to environment:.

auto: &automatic
    <<: *base_service
    profiles: ["auto"]
    build: ./services/AUTOMATIC1111
    image: sd-auto:51
    environment:
      - CLI_ARGS=--allow-code --medvram --xformers --enable-insecure-extension-access --api
      - TZ=Asia/Tokyo

Tasks at first startup

The rest of the process is as described in the GitHub documentation. Inside the folder where the code is expanded, run the following command:

docker compose --profile download up --build

After the command runs, the log of a container named webui-docker-download-1 will be displayed on the screen. For a while, the download will run as follows, so wait until it is complete:

webui-docker-download-1  | [DL:256KiB][#4561e1 1.4GiB/3.9GiB(36%)][#42c377 1.4GiB/3.9GiB(37%)]

If the process ends successfully, it will be displayed as exited with code 0 and returned to the original prompt:

…(snip)
webui-docker-download-1  | https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN/blob/master/LICENSE 
webui-docker-download-1  | https://github.com/xinntao/ESRGAN/blob/master/LICENSE 
webui-docker-download-1  | https://github.com/cszn/SCUNet/blob/main/LICENSE 
webui-docker-download-1 exited with code 0

If a code other than 0 comes out like the following, the download process has failed:

webui-docker-download-1  | 42c377|OK  |   426KiB/s|/data/StableDiffusion/sd-v1-5-inpainting.ckpt 
webui-docker-download-1  | 
webui-docker-download-1  | Status Legend: 
webui-docker-download-1  | (OK):download completed.(ERR):error occurred. 
webui-docker-download-1  | 
webui-docker-download-1  | aria2 will resume download if the transfer is restarted. 
webui-docker-download-1  | If there are any errors, then see the log file. See '-l' option in help/m 
an page for details. 
webui-docker-download-1 exited with code 24

In this case, run the command again and check whether it ends successfully. Once it finishes successfully, run the command to start the WebUI. 

Note: The following is for AUTOMATIC1111’s UI and GPU specification:

docker compose --profile auto up --build

When you run the command, loading the model at the first startup may take a few minutes. It may look like it’s frozen like the following display, but that’s okay:

webui-docker-auto-1  | LatentDiffusion: Running in eps-prediction mode
webui-docker-auto-1  | DiffusionWrapper has 859.52 M params.

If you wait for a while, the log will flow, and the following URL will be displayed:

webui-docker-auto-1  | Running on local URL:  http://0.0.0.0:7860

Now the startup preparation of the Web UI is set. If you open http://127.0.0.1:7860 from the browser, you can see the Web UI. Once open, select an appropriate model from the top left of the screen, write some text in the text field, and select the Generate button to start generating images (Figure 4).

When you click, the button will be reversed. Wait until the process is finished (Figure 5).

At this time, the log of image generation appears on the terminal you are operating, and you can also check the similar display by looking at the log of the container on Docker Desktop (Figure 6).

When the status reaches 100%, the generation of the image is finished, and you can check it on the screen (Figure 7).

The created images are automatically saved in the output/txt2img/date folder directly under the directory where you ran the docker compose command.

To stop the launched WebUI, enter Ctrl+C on the terminal that is still running the docker compose command.

Gracefully stopping... (press Ctrl+C again to force)
Aborting on container exit...
[+] Running 1/1
 ? Container webui-docker-auto-1  Stopped                                                     11.4s
canceled

When the process ends successfully, you will be able to run the command again. To use the WebUI again after restarting, re-run the docker compose command:

docker compose --profile auto up --build

To see the operating hardware status, use the task manager to look at the GPU status (Figure 8).

To check whether the GPU is visible from inside the container and to see whether the information comes out, run the nvidia-smi command from docker exec or the Docker Desktop terminal.

root@e37fcc5a5810:/stable-diffusion-webui# nvidia-smi 
Mon Apr 17 07:42:27 2023 
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
| NVIDIA-SMI 530.41.03              Driver Version: 531.41       CUDA Version: 12.1     | 
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ 
| GPU  Name                  Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC | 
| Fan  Temp  Perf            Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. | 
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. | 
|=========================================+======================+======================| 
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 S...    On | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A | 
| 42%   40C    P8                6W / 175W|   2558MiB /  8192MiB |      2%      Default | 
|                                         |                      |                  N/A | 
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ 
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
| Processes:                                                                            | 
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory | 
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      | 
|=======================================================================================| 
|    0   N/A  N/A       149      C   /python3.10                               N/A      | 
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Adding models and VAEs

If you download a model that is not included from the beginning, place files with extensions, such as .safetensors in stable-diffusion-webui-docker\data\StableDiffusion. In the case of VAE, place .skpt files in stable-diffusion-webui-docker\data\VAE.

If you’re using Docker Desktop, you can view and operate inside on the Files of the webui-docker-auto-1 container, so you can also drag it into Docker Desktop. 

Figure 9 shows the Docker Desktop screen. It says MOUNT in the Note column, and it shares the information in the folder with the container from the Windows host side.

Now, after placing the file, a link to Reload UI is shown in the footer of the WebUI, so select there (Figure 10).

When you select Reload UI, the system will show a loading screen, and the browser connection will be cut off. When you reload the browser, the model and VAE files are automatically loaded. To remove a model, delete the model file from data\StableDiffusion.

Conclusion

With Docker Desktop, image generation using the latest generative AI environment can be done easier than ever. Typically, a lot of time and effort is required just to set up the environment, but Docker Desktop solves this complexity. If you’re interested, why not take a challenge in the world of generative AI? Enjoy!

Learn more

• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.

A crucial aspect of building successful chatbots is the ability to handle frequently asked questions (FAQs) seamlessly. FAQs form a significant portion of user queries in various domains, such as customer support, e-commerce, and information retrieval. Being able to provide accurate and prompt answers to common questions not only improves user satisfaction but also frees up human agents to focus on more complex tasks. 

In this article, we’ll look at how to use the open source Rasa framework along with Docker to build and deploy a containerized, conversational AI chatbot.

Meet Rasa 

To tackle the challenge of FAQ handling, developers turn to sophisticated technologies like Rasa, an open source conversational AI framework. Rasa offers a comprehensive set of tools and libraries that empower developers to create intelligent chatbots with natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities. With Rasa, you can build chatbots that understand user intents, extract relevant information, and provide contextual responses based on the conversation flow.

Rasa allows developers to build and deploy conversational AI chatbots and provides a flexible architecture and powerful NLU capabilities (Figure 1).

Rasa is a popular choice for building conversational AI applications, including chatbots and virtual assistants, for several reasons. For example, Rasa is an open source framework, which means it is freely available for developers to use, modify, and contribute to. It provides a flexible and customizable architecture that gives developers full control over the chatbot’s behavior and capabilities. 

Rasa’s NLU capabilities allow you to extract intent and entity information from user messages, enabling the chatbot to understand and respond appropriately. Rasa supports different language models and machine learning (ML) algorithms for accurate and context-aware language understanding. 

Rasa also incorporates ML techniques to train and improve the chatbot’s performance over time. You can train the model using your own training data and refine it through iterative feedback loops, resulting in a chatbot that becomes more accurate and effective with each interaction. 

Additionally, Rasa can scale to handle large volumes of conversations and can be extended with custom actions, APIs, and external services. This capability allows you to integrate additional functionalities, such as database access, external API calls, and business logic, into your chatbot.

Why containerizing Rasa is important

Containerizing Rasa brings several important benefits to the development and deployment process of conversational AI chatbots. Here are four key reasons why containerizing Rasa is important:

1. Docker provides a consistent and portable environment for running applications.

By containerizing Rasa, you can package the chatbot application, its dependencies, and runtime environment into a self-contained unit. This approach allows you to deploy the containerized Rasa chatbot across different environments, such as development machines, staging servers, and production clusters, with minimal configuration or compatibility issues. 

Docker simplifies the management of dependencies for the Rasa chatbot. By encapsulating all the required libraries, packages, and configurations within the container, you can avoid conflicts with other system dependencies and ensure that the chatbot has access to the specific versions of libraries it needs. This containerization eliminates the need for manual installation and configuration of dependencies on different systems, making the deployment process more streamlined and reliable.

2. Docker ensures the reproducibility of your Rasa chatbot’s environment.

By defining the exact dependencies, libraries, and configurations within the container, you can guarantee that the chatbot will run consistently across different deployments. 

3. Docker enables seamless scalability of the Rasa chatbot.

With containers, you can easily replicate and distribute instances of the chatbot across multiple nodes or servers, allowing you to handle high volumes of user interactions. 

4. Docker provides isolation between the chatbot and the host system and between different containers running on the same host.

This isolation ensures that the chatbot’s dependencies and runtime environment do not interfere with the host system or other applications. It also allows for easy management of dependencies and versioning, preventing conflicts and ensuring a clean and isolated environment in which the chatbot can operate.

Building an ML FAQ model demo application

By combining the power of Rasa and Docker, developers can create an ML FAQ model demo that excels in handling frequently asked questions. The demo can be trained on a dataset of common queries and their corresponding answers, allowing the chatbot to understand and respond to similar questions with high accuracy.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build an ML FAQ model demo using Rasa and Docker. You’ll set up a development environment to train the model and then deploy the model using Docker. You will also see how to integrate a WebChat UI frontend for easy user interaction. Let’s jump in.

Getting started

The following key components are essential to completing this walkthrough:

• Docker Desktop 

Deploying an ML FAQ demo app is a simple process involving the following steps:

• Clone the repository. 
• Set up the configuration files. 
• Initialize Rasa.
• Train and run the model. 
• Bring up the WebChat UI app. 

We’ll explain each of these steps below.

Cloning the project

To get started, you can clone the repository by running the following command:

https://github.com/dockersamples/docker-ml-faq-rasa

docker-ml-faq-rasa % tree -L 2
.
├── Dockerfile-webchat
├── README.md
├── actions
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── __pycache__
│   └── actions.py
├── config.yml
├── credentials.yml
├── data
│   ├── nlu.yml
│   ├── rules.yml
│   └── stories.yml
├── docker-compose.yaml
├── domain.yml
├── endpoints.yml
├── index.html
├── models
│   ├── 20230618-194810-chill-idea.tar.gz
│   └── 20230619-082740-upbeat-step.tar.gz
└── tests
    └── test_stories.yml

6 directories, 16 files

Before we move to the next step, let’s look at each of the files one by one.

File: domain.yml

This file describes the chatbot’s domain and includes crucial data including intents, entities, actions, and answers. It outlines the conversation’s structure, including the user’s input, and the templates for the bot’s responses.

version: "3.1"

intents:
  - greet
  - goodbye
  - affirm
  - deny
  - mood_great
  - mood_unhappy
  - bot_challenge

responses:
  utter_greet:
  - text: "Hey! How are you?"

  utter_cheer_up:
  - text: "Here is something to cheer you up:"
    image: "https://i.imgur.com/nGF1K8f.jpg"

  utter_did_that_help:
  - text: "Did that help you?"

  utter_happy:
  - text: "Great, carry on!"

  utter_goodbye:
  - text: "Bye"

  utter_iamabot:
  - text: "I am a bot, powered by Rasa."

session_config:
  session_expiration_time: 60
  carry_over_slots_to_new_session: true

As shown previously, this configuration file includes intents, which represent the different types of user inputs the bot can understand. It also includes responses, which are the bot’s predefined messages for various situations. For example, the bot can greet the user, provide a cheer-up image, ask if the previous response helped, express happiness, say goodbye, or mention that it’s a bot powered by Rasa.

The session configuration sets the expiration time for a session (in this case, 60 seconds) and specifies whether the bot should carry over slots (data) from a previous session to a new session.

File: nlu.yml

The NLU training data are defined in this file. It includes input samples and the intents and entities that go with them. The NLU model, which connects user inputs to the right actions, is trained using this data.

version: "3.1"

nlu:
- intent: greet
  examples: |
    - hey
    - hello
    - hi
    - hello there
    - good morning
    - good evening
    - moin
    - hey there
    - let's go
    - hey dude
    - goodmorning
    - goodevening
    - good afternoon

- intent: goodbye
  examples: |
    - cu
    - good by
    - cee you later
    - good night
    - bye
    - goodbye
    - have a nice day
    - see you around
    - bye bye
    - see you later

- intent: affirm
  examples: |
    - yes
    - y
    - indeed
    - of course
    - that sounds good
    - correct

- intent: deny
  examples: |
    - no
    - n
    - never
    - I don't think so
    - don't like that
    - no way
    - not really

- intent: mood_great
  examples: |
    - perfect
    - great
    - amazing
    - feeling like a king
    - wonderful
    - I am feeling very good
    - I am great
    - I am amazing
    - I am going to save the world
    - super stoked
    - extremely good
    - so so perfect
    - so good
    - so perfect

- intent: mood_unhappy
  examples: |
    - my day was horrible
    - I am sad
    - I don't feel very well
    - I am disappointed
    - super sad
    - I'm so sad
    - sad
    - very sad
    - unhappy
    - not good
    - not very good
    - extremly sad
    - so saad
    - so sad

- intent: bot_challenge
  examples: |
    - are you a bot?
    - are you a human?
    - am I talking to a bot?
    - am I talking to a human?

This configuration file defines several intents, which represent different types of user inputs that the chatbot can recognize. Each intent has a list of examples, which are example phrases or sentences that users might type or say to express that particular intent.

You can customize and expand upon this configuration by adding more intents and examples that are relevant to your chatbot’s domain and use cases.

File: stories.yml

This file is used to define the training stories, which serve as examples of user-chatbot interactions. A series of user inputs, bot answers, and the accompanying intents and entities make up each story.

version: "3.1"

stories:

- story: happy path
  steps:
  - intent: greet
  - action: utter_greet
  - intent: mood_great
  - action: utter_happy

- story: sad path 1
  steps:
  - intent: greet
  - action: utter_greet
  - intent: mood_unhappy
  - action: utter_cheer_up
  - action: utter_did_that_help
  - intent: affirm
  - action: utter_happy

- story: sad path 2
  steps:
  - intent: greet
  - action: utter_greet
  - intent: mood_unhappy
  - action: utter_cheer_up
  - action: utter_did_that_help
  - intent: deny
  - action: utter_goodbye

The stories.yml file you provided contains a few training stories for a Rasa chatbot. These stories represent different conversation paths between the user and the chatbot. Each story consists of a series of steps, where each step corresponds to an intent or an action.

Here’s a breakdown of steps for the training stories in the file:

Story: happy path

• User greets with an intent: greet
• Bot responds with an action: utter_greet
• User expresses a positive mood with an intent: mood_great
• Bot acknowledges the positive mood with an action: utter_happy

Story: sad path 1

• User greets with an intent: greet
• Bot responds with an action: utter_greet
• User expresses an unhappy mood with an intent: mood_unhappy
• Bot tries to cheer the user up with an action: utter_cheer_up
• Bot asks if the previous response helped with an action: utter_did_that_help
• User confirms that it helped with an intent: affirm
• Bot acknowledges the confirmation with an action: utter_happy

Story: sad path 2

• User greets with an intent: greet
• Bot responds with an action: utter_greet
• User expresses an unhappy mood with an intent: mood_unhappy
• Bot tries to cheer the user up with an action: utter_cheer_up
• Bot asks if the previous response helped with an action: utter_did_that_help
• User denies that it helped with an intent: deny
• Bot says goodbye with an action: utter_goodbye

These training stories are used to train the Rasa chatbot on different conversation paths and to teach it how to respond appropriately to user inputs based on their intents.

File: config.yml

The configuration parameters for your Rasa project are contained in this file.

# The config recipe.
# https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/model-configuration/
recipe: default.v1

# The assistant project unique identifier
# This default value must be replaced with a unique assistant name within your deployment
assistant_id: placeholder_default

# Configuration for Rasa NLU.
# https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/nlu/components/
language: en

pipeline:
# # No configuration for the NLU pipeline was provided. The following default pipeline was used to train your model.
# # If you'd like to customize it, uncomment and adjust the pipeline.
# # See https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/tuning-your-model for more information.
#   - name: WhitespaceTokenizer
#   - name: RegexFeaturizer
#   - name: LexicalSyntacticFeaturizer
#   - name: CountVectorsFeaturizer
#   - name: CountVectorsFeaturizer
#     analyzer: char_wb
#     min_ngram: 1
#     max_ngram: 4
#   - name: DIETClassifier
#     epochs: 100
#     constrain_similarities: true
#   - name: EntitySynonymMapper
#   - name: ResponseSelector
#     epochs: 100
#     constrain_similarities: true
#   - name: FallbackClassifier
#     threshold: 0.3
#     ambiguity_threshold: 0.1

# Configuration for Rasa Core.
# https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/core/policies/
policies:
# # No configuration for policies was provided. The following default policies were used to train your model.
# # If you'd like to customize them, uncomment and adjust the policies.
# # See https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/policies for more information.
#   - name: MemoizationPolicy
#   - name: RulePolicy
#   - name: UnexpecTEDIntentPolicy
#     max_history: 5
#     epochs: 100
#   - name: TEDPolicy
#     max_history: 5
#     epochs: 100
#     constrain_similarities: true

The configuration parameters for your Rasa project are contained in this file. Here is a breakdown of the configuration file:

1. Assistant ID:

• Assistant_id: placeholder_default
• This placeholder value should be replaced with a unique identifier for your assistant.

2. Rasa NLU configuration:

• Language: en
  • Specifies the language used for natural language understanding.
• Pipeline:
  • Defines the pipeline of components used for NLU processing.
  • The pipeline is currently commented out, and the default pipeline is used.
  • The default pipeline includes various components like tokenizers, featurizers, classifiers, and response selectors.
  • If you want to customize the pipeline, you can uncomment the lines and adjust the pipeline configuration.

3. Rasa core configuration:

• Policies:
  • Specifies the policies used for dialogue management.
  • The policies are currently commented out, and the default policies are used.
  • The default policies include memoization, rule-based, and TED (Transformer   Embedding Dialogue) policies
  • If you want to customize the policies, you can uncomment the lines and adjust the policy configuration.

File: actions.py

The custom actions that your chatbot can execute are contained in this file. Retrieving data from an API, communicating with a database, or doing any other unique business logic are all examples of actions.

# This files contains your custom actions which can be used to run
# custom Python code.
#
# See this guide on how to implement these action:
# https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/custom-actions


# This is a simple example for a custom action which utters "Hello World!"

# from typing import Any, Text, Dict, List
#
# from rasa_sdk import Action, Tracker
# from rasa_sdk.executor import CollectingDispatcher
#
#
# class ActionHelloWorld(Action):
#
#     def name(self) -> Text:
#         return "action_hello_world"
#
#     def run(self, dispatcher: CollectingDispatcher,
#             tracker: Tracker,
#             domain: Dict[Text, Any]) -> List[Dict[Text, Any]]:
#
#         dispatcher.utter_message(text="Hello World!")
#
#         return []

Explanation of the code:

• The ActionHelloWorld class extends the Action class provided by the rasa_sdk.
• The name method defines the name of the custom action, which in this case is “action_hello_world”.
• The run method is where the logic for the custom action is implemented.
• Within the run method, the dispatcher object is used to send a message back to the user. In this example, the message sent is “Hello World!”.
• The return [] statement indicates that the custom action has completed its execution.

File: endpoints.yml

The endpoints for your chatbot are specified in this file, including any external services or the webhook URL for any custom actions.  

Initializing Rasa

This command initializes a new Rasa project in the current directory ($(pwd)):

docker run  -p 5005:5005 -v $(pwd):/app rasa/rasa:3.5.2 init --no-prompt

It sets up the basic directory structure and creates essential files for a Rasa project, such as config.yml, domain.yml, and data/nlu.yml. The -p flag maps port 5005 inside the container to the same port on the host, allowing you to access the Rasa server. <IMAGE>:3.5.2 refers to the Docker image for the specific version of Rasa you want to use.

Training the model

The following command trains a Rasa model using the data and configuration specified in the project directory:

docker run -v $(pwd):/app rasa/rasa:3.5.2 train --domain domain.yml --data data --out models

The -v flag mounts the current directory ($(pwd)) inside the container, allowing access to the project files. The --domain domain.yml flag specifies the domain configuration file, --data data points to the directory containing the training data, and --out models specifies the output directory where the trained model will be saved.

Running the model

This command runs the trained Rasa model in interactive mode, enabling you to test the chatbot’s responses:

docker run -v $(pwd):/app rasa/rasa:3.5.2 shell

The command loads the trained model from the models directory in the current project directory ($(pwd)). The chatbot will be accessible in the terminal, allowing you to have interactive conversations and see the model’s responses.

Verify Rasa is running:

curl localhost:5005
Hello from Rasa: 3.5.2

Now you can send the message and test your model with curl:

curl --location 'http://localhost:5005/webhooks/rest/webhook' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
 "sender": "Test person",
 "message": "how are you ?"}'

Running WebChat

The following command deploys the trained Rasa model as a server accessible via a WebChat UI:

docker run -p 5005:5005 -v $(pwd):/app rasa/rasa:3.5.2 run -m models --enable-api --cors "*" --debug

The -p flag maps port 5005 inside the container to the same port on the host, making the Rasa server accessible. The -m models flag specifies the directory containing the trained model. The --enable-api flag enables the Rasa API, allowing external applications to interact with the chatbot. The --cors "*" flag enables cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) to handle requests from different domains. The --debug flag enables debug mode for enhanced logging and troubleshooting.

docker run -p 8080:80 harshmanvar/docker-ml-faq-rasa:webchat

Open http://localhost:8080 in the browser (Figure 3).

Defining services using a Compose file

Here’s how our services appear within a Docker Compose file:

services:
  rasa:
    image: rasa/rasa:3.5.2
    ports:
      - 5005:5005
    volumes:
      - ./:/app
    command: run -m models --enable-api --cors "*" --debug
  Webchat:
    image: harshmanvar/docker-ml-faq-rasa:webchat 
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile-webchat
    ports:
      - 8080:80

Your sample application has the following parts:

• The rasa service is based on the rasa/rasa:3.5.2 image. 
• It exposes port 5005 to communicate with the Rasa API. 
• The current directory (./) is mounted as a volume inside the container, allowing the Rasa project files to be accessible. 
• The command run -m models --enable-api --cors "*" --debug starts the Rasa server with the specified options.
• The webchat service is based on the harshmanvar/docker-ml-faq-rasa:webchat image. It builds the image using the Dockerfile-webchat file located in the current context (.). Port 8080 on the host is mapped to port 80 inside the container to access the webchat interface.

You can clone the repository or download the docker-compose.yml file directly from GitHub.

Bringing up the container services

You can start the WebChat application by running the following command:

docker compose up -d --build

Then, use the docker compose ps command to confirm that your stack is running properly. Your terminal will produce the following output:

docker compose ps
NAME                            IMAGE                                  COMMAND                  SERVICE             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS
docker-ml-faq-rassa-rasa-1      harshmanvar/docker-ml-faq-rasa:3.5.2   "rasa run -m models …"   rasa                6 seconds ago       Up 5 seconds        0.0.0.0:5005->5005/tcp
docker-ml-faq-rassa-webchat-1   docker-ml-faq-rassa-webchat            "/docker-entrypoint.…"   webchat             6 seconds ago       Up 5 seconds        0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp

Viewing the containers via Docker Dashboard

You can also leverage the Docker Dashboard to view your container’s ID and easily access or manage your application (Figure 4):

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve learned how to containerize a Rasa application with Docker. With a single YAML file, we’ve demonstrated how Docker Compose helps you quickly build and deploy an ML FAQ Demo Model app in seconds. With just a few extra steps, you can apply this tutorial while building applications with even greater complexity. Happy developing.

Check out Rasa on DockerHub.

Added support for new Wasm runtimes

Docker Desktop 4.21 now has added support for the following Wasm runtimes: Slight, Spin, and Wasmtime. These runtimes can be downloaded on demand when the containerd image store is enabled. The following steps outline the process:

1. In Docker Desktop, navigate to the settings by clicking the gear icon.
2. Select the Features in development tab.
3. Check the boxes for Use containerd for pulling and storing images and Enable Wasm.
4. Select Apply & restart.
5. When prompted for Wasm Runtimes Installation, select Install.
6. After installation, these runtimes can be used to run Wasm workloads locally with the corresponding flags, for example:
   --runtime=io.containerd.spin.v1 --platform=wasi/wasm32

Docker Init (Beta) added support for Rust 

In the 4.21 release, we’ve added Rust server support to Docker Init. Docker Init is a CLI command in beta that simplifies the process of adding Docker to a project. (Learn more about Docker Init in our blog post: Docker Init: Initialize Dockerfiles and Compose files with a single CLI command.)

You can try Docker Init with Rust by updating to the latest version of Docker Desktop and typing docker init in the command line while inside a target project folder. 

The Docker team is working on adding more languages and frameworks for this command, including Java and .Net. Let us know if you want us to support a specific language or framework. We welcome feedback as we continue to develop and improve Docker Init (Beta).

Docker Scout dashboard enhancements 

The Docker Scout Dashboard helps you share the analysis of images in an organization with your team. Developers can now see an overview of their security status across all their images from both Docker Hub and Artifactory (more registry integrations coming soon) and get remediation advice at their fingertips. Docker Scout analysis helps team members in roles such as security, compliance, and operations to know what vulnerabilities and issues they need to focus on.

Visit the Docker Scout vulnerability dashboard to get end-to-end observability into your supply chain. 

Docker Buildx v0.11

Docker Buildx component has been updated to a new version, enabling many new features. For example, you can now load multi-platform images into the Docker image store when containerd image store is enabled.

The buildx bake command now supports matrix builds, allowing defining multiple configurations of the same build target that can all be built together.

There are also multiple new experimental commands for better debugging support for your builds. Read more from the release changelog. 

Builds (Beta)

Docker Desktop 4.21 includes our Builds view beta release. Builds view gives you visibility into the active builds currently running on your system and enables analysis and debugging of your completed builds.

All builds started with docker build or docker buildx build commands will automatically appear in the Builds view. From there, you can inspect all the properties of a build invocation, including timing information, build cache usage, Dockerfile source, etc. Builds view also provides you full access to all of the logs and properties of individual build steps.

If you are working with multiple Buildx builder instances (for example, running builds inside a Docker container or Kubernetes cluster), Builds view include a new Builders settings view to make it even easier to manage additional builders or set default builder instances.

Builds view is currently in beta as we are continuing to improve them. To enable them, go to Settings > Features in development > Turn on Builds view.

Faster startup and file sharing for macOS 

Launching Docker Desktop on Apple Silicon Macs is at least 25% quicker in 4.21 compared to previous Docker Desktop versions. Previously the start time would scale linearly with the amount of memory allocated to Docker, which meant that users with higher-spec Macs would experience slower startup. This bug has been fixed and now Docker starts in four seconds on Apple Silicon. 

Docker Desktop 4.21 uses VirtioFS by default on macOS 12.5+, which provides substantial performance gains when sharing host files with containers (for example, via docker run -v). The time taken to build the Redis engine drops from seven minutes on Docker Desktop 4.20 to only two minutes on Docker Desktop 4.21, for example.

Conclusion

Upgrade now to explore what’s new in the 4.21 release of Docker Desktop. Do you have feedback? Leave feedback on our public GitHub roadmap and let us know what else you’d like to see.

Learn more

• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Have questions? The Docker community is here to help.
• New to Docker? Get started.

“Docker is more than a container tool. It comprises multiple developer tools that have become the industry standard for self-service developer platforms, empowering teams to be more efficient, secure, and collaborative,” says Docker CEO Scott Johnston. “Bringing Mutagen into the Docker family is another example of how we continuously evolve our offering to meet the needs of developers with a product that works seamlessly and improves the way developers work.”

The Mutagen acquisition introduces novel mechanisms for developers to extract the highest level of performance from their local hardware while simultaneously opening the gateway to the newest remote development solutions. We continue scaling the abilities of Docker Desktop to meet the needs of the growing number of developers, businesses, and enterprises relying on the platform.

 “Docker Desktop is focused on equipping every developer and dev team with blazing-fast tools to accelerate app creation and iteration by harnessing the combined might of local and cloud resources. By seamlessly integrating and magnifying Mutagen’s capabilities within our platform, we will provide our users and customers with unrivaled flexibility and an extraordinary opportunity to innovate rapidly,” says Webb Stevens, General Manager, Docker Desktop.

 “There are so many captivating integration and experimentation opportunities that were previously inaccessible as a third-party offering,” says Jacob Howard, the CEO at Mutagen. “As Mutagen’s lead developer and a Docker Captain, my ultimate goal has always been to enhance the development experience for Docker users. As an integral part of Docker’s technology landscape, Mutagen is now in a privileged position to achieve that goal.”

Jacob will join Docker’s engineering team, spearheading the integration of Mutagen’s technologies into Docker Desktop and other Docker products.

You can get started with Mutagen today by downloading the latest version of Docker Desktop and installing the Mutagen extension, available in the Docker Extensions Marketplace. Support for current Mutagen offerings, open source and paid, will continue as we develop new and better integration options.

FAQ | Docker Acquisition of Mutagen

With Docker’s acquisition of Mutagen, you’re sure to have questions. We’ve answered the most common ones in this FAQ.

As with all of our open source efforts, Docker strives to do right by the community. We want this acquisition to benefit everyone — community and customer — in keeping with our developer obsession.

What will happen to Mutagen Pro subscriptions and the Mutagen Extension for Docker Desktop?

Both will continue as we evaluate and develop new and better integration options. Existing Mutagen Pro subscribers will see an update to the supplier on their invoices, but no other billing changes will occur.

Will Mutagen become closed-source?

There are no plans to change the licensing structure of Mutagen’s open source components. Docker has always valued the contributions of open source communities.

Will Mutagen or its companion projects be discontinued?

There are no plans to discontinue any Mutagen projects. 

Will people still be able to contribute to Mutagen’s open source projects?

Yes! Mutagen has always benefited from outside collaboration in the form of feedback, discussion, and code contributions, and there’s no desire to change that relationship. For more information about how to participate in Mutagen’s development, see the contributing guidelines.

What about other downstream users, companies, and projects using Mutagen?

Mutagen’s open source licenses continue to allow the embedding and use of Mutagen by other projects, products, and tooling.

Who will provide support for Mutagen projects and products?

In the short term, support for Mutagen’s projects and products will continue to be provided through the existing support channels. We will work to merge support into Docker’s channels in the near future.

Is this replacing Virtiofs, gRPC-FUSE, or osxfs?

No, virtual filesystems will continue to be the default path for bind mounts in Docker Desktop. Docker is continuing to invest in the performance of these technologies.

How does Mutagen compare with other virtual or remote filesystems?

Mutagen is a synchronization engine rather than a virtual or remote filesystem. Mutagen can be used to synchronize files to native filesystems, such as ext4, trading typically imperceptible amounts of latency for full native filesystem performance.

How does Mutagen compare with other synchronization solutions?

Mutagen focuses primarily on configuration and functionality relevant to developers.

How can I get started with Mutagen?

To get started with Mutagen, download the latest version of Docker Desktop and install the Mutagen Extension from the Docker Desktop Extensions Marketplace.

Giving developers speed, security, and choice

While we’re pleased with this recognition, for us it means we cannot slow down: We need to go even faster in our effort to serve developers. In what ways? Well, our developer community tells us they value speed, security, and choice:

• Speed: Developers want to maximize their time writing code for their app — and minimize set-up and overhead — so they can ship early and often.
• Security: Specifically, non-intrusive, informative, and actionable security. Developers want to catch and fix vulnerabilities right now when coding in their “inner loop,” not 30 minutes later in CI or seven days later in production.
• Choice: Developers want the freedom to explore new technologies and select the right tool for the right job and not be constrained to use lowest-common-denominator technologies in “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” monolithic tools.

And indeed, these are the “North Stars” that inform our roadmap and prioritize our product development efforts. Recent examples include:

Speed

• Docker Init: Automatically generates Dockerfiles and docker-compose.yml files for Python, Node, and Go apps.
• VirtioFS support: 98% reduction in database import time.
• Docker Compose file watch: Automatically detects and syncs local host code changes with the container.
• vpnkit => gVisor: 5X faster container-to-host networking performance.

Security

• Docker Scout: Automatically detects vulnerabilities and recommends fixes while devs are coding in their “inner loop.”
• Attestations: Docker Build automatically generates SBOMs and SLSA Provenance and attaches them to the image.

Choice

• Docker Extensions: Launched just over a year ago, and since then, partners and community members have created and published to Docker Hub more than 700 Docker Extensions for a wide range of developer tools covering Kubernetes app development, security, observability, and more.
• Docker-Sponsored Open Source Projects: Available 100% for free on Docker Hub, this sponsorship program supports more than 600 open source community projects.
• Multiple architectures: A single docker build command can produce an image that runs on multiple architectures, including x86, ARM, RISC-V, and even IBM mainframes.

What’s next?

While we’re pleased that our efforts have been well-received by our developer community, we’re not slowing down. So many exciting changes in our industry today present us with new opportunities to serve developers.

For example, the lines between the local developer laptop and the cloud are becoming increasingly blurred. This offers opportunities to combine the power of the cloud with the convenience and low latency of local development. Another example is AI/ML. Specifically, LLMs in feedback loops with users offer opportunities to automate more tasks to further reduce the toil on developers.

Watch these spaces — we’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

Thank you!

Docker only exists because of our community of developers, Docker Captains and Community Leaders, customers, and partners, and we’re grateful for your on-going support as reflected in this year’s Stack Overflow survey results. On behalf of everyone here at Team Docker: THANK YOU. And we look forward to continuing to build the future together with you.

Learn more

• Get the latest release of Docker Desktop.
• Vote on what’s next! Check out our public roadmap.
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Observability has made a huge leap in recent years, and advanced technologies such as OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and eBPF have simplified the process of collecting runtime data for applications. Yet, for all that progress, developers may still be on the fence about whether and how to use this new resource. The effort required to transform the raw data into something meaningful and beneficial for the development process may seem to outweigh the advantages offered by these technologies.

The practice of continuous feedback envisions a development flow in which this particular problem has been solved. By making the evaluation of code runtime data continuous, developers can benefit from shorter feedback loops and tighter control of their codebase. Instead of waiting for issues to develop in production systems, or even surface in testing, various developer tools can watch the code observability data for you and provide early warning and rigorous linting for regressions, code smells, or issues. 

At the same time, gathering information back into the code from multiple deployment environments, such as the test or production environment, can help developers understand how a specific function, query, or event is performing in the real world at a single glance.

Meet Digma, the first linter for your runtime data 

Digma is a free developer tool that was created to bridge the continuous feedback gap in the DevOps loop. It aims to make sense of the gazillion metrics traces and logs the code is spewing out — so that developers won’t have to. And, it does this continuously and automatically. 

To make the tool even more practical, Digma processes the observability data and uses it to lint the source code itself, right in the IDE. From a developer’s perspective, this means a whole new level of information about the code is revealed — allowing for better code design based on real-world feedback, as well as quick turnaround for fixing regression or avoiding common pitfalls and anti-patterns.

How Digma is deployed

Digma is packaged as a self-contained Docker extension to make it easy for developers to evaluate their code without registration to an external service or sharing any data that might not be allowed by corporate policy (Figure 1). As such, Digma acts as your own intelligent agent for monitoring code execution, especially in development and testing. The backend component is able to track execution over time and highlight any inadvertent changes to behavior, performance, or error patterns that should be addressed.  

To collect data about the code, behind the scenes Digma leverages OpenTelemetry, a widely used open standard for modern observability. To make getting started easier, Digma takes care of the configuration work for you, so from the developer’s point of view, getting started with continuous feedback is equivalent to flipping a switch.

Once the information is collected using OTEL, Digma runs it through what could be described as a reverse pipeline, aggregating the data, analyzing it and providing it via an API to multiple outlets including the IDE plugin, Jaeger, and the Docker extension dashboard that we’ll describe in this example.

Note: Currently, Digma supports Java applications running on IntelliJ IDEA; however, support for additional languages and platforms will be rolling out in the coming months.

Installing Digma

Prerequisites: Docker Desktop 4.8 or later.

Note: You must ensure that the Docker Extension is enabled (Figure 2).

Step 1. Installing the Digma Docker Extension

In the Extensions Marketplace, search for Digma and select Install (Figure 3).

Step 2. Collecting feedback about your code

After installing the Digma extension from the marketplace, you’ll be directed to a quickstart page that will guide you through the next steps to collect feedback about your code. Digma can collect information from two different sources:

• Your tests/debug sessions within the IDE
• Any Docker containers you may have running in Docker desktop

Getting feedback while debugging/running code in the IDE

Digma’s IDE extension makes the process of collecting data about your code in the IDE trivial. The entire setup is reduced to a single toggle button click (Figure 4). Behind the scenes, Digma adds variables to the runtime configuration, so that it uses OpenTelemetry for observability. No prior knowledge or observability is needed, and no code changes are necessary to get this to work. 

With the observability toggle enabled, you’ll start getting immediate feedback as you run your code locally, or even when you execute your tests. Digma will be on the lookout for any regressions and will automatically spot code smells and issues.

Getting feedback from running containers

In addition to the IDE, you can also choose to collect data from any running container on your machine running Java code. The process to do that is extremely simple and also documented in the Digma extension Getting Started page. It does not involve changing any Dockerfile or code. Basically, you download the OTEL agent, mount it to a volume on the container, and set some environment variables that point the Java process to use it.

curl --create-dirs -O -L --output-dir ./otel
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation/releases/latest/download/opentelemetry-javaagent.jar

curl --create-dirs -O -L --output-dir ./otel
https://github.com/digma-ai/otel-java-instrumentation/releases/latest/download/digma-otel-agent-extension.jar

export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-javaagent:/otel/javaagent.jar -Dotel.exporter.otlp.endpoint=http://localhost:5050 -Dotel.javaagent.extensions=/otel/digma-otel-agent-extension.jar"
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME={--ENTER YOUR SERVICE NAME HERE--}
export DEPLOYMENT_ENV=LOCAL_DOCKER

docker run -d -v "/$(pwd)/otel:/otel" --env JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS --env OTEL_SERVICE_NAME --env DEPLOYMENT_ENV {-- APPEND PARAMS AND REPO/IMAGE --}

Uncovering how the code behaves in runtime

Whether you collect data from running containers or in the IDE, Digma will continuously analyze the code behavior and make the analysis results available both as code annotations in the IDE and as dashboards in the Digma extension itself. To demonstrate a live example, we’ve created a sample application based on the Java Spring Boot PetClinic app. 

In this scenario, we’ll clone the repo and run the code from the IDE, triggering a few actions to see what they reveal about the code. For convenience, we’ve created run configurations to simulate common API calls and create interesting data:

1. Open the PetClinic project here in your IntelliJ IDE.
2. Run the petclinic-service configuration.
3. Access the API and play around with it on http://localhost:9753/ or simply run the ClientTested run config included in the workspace.

Almost immediately, the result of the dynamic linting analysis will start appearing over the code in the IDE (Figure 5):

At the same time, the Digma extension itself will present a dashboard cataloging all of the assets that have been identified, including code locations, API endpoints, database queries, and more (Figure 6). For each asset, you’ll be able to access basic statistics about its performance as well as a more detailed list of issues of concern that may need to be tracked about their runtime behavior.

Using the observability data

One of the main problems Digma tries to solve is not how to collect observability data but how to turn it into a useful and practical asset that can speed up development processes and improve the code. Digma’s insights can be directly applied during design time, based on existing data, as well as to validate changes as they are being run in dev/test/prod and to get early feedback and shorter loops into the development process.

Examples of design time planning code insights:

• See runtime usage for the modified functions and understand who will be affected by the change
• Concurrency to plan for, bottlenecks and criticality
• Existing errors and exceptions that need to be handled by the new component
• See complete visualization of the flow of control using the modified code 

Examples of runtime code validations for shorter feedback loops:

• Catch code and query modeling smells, such as N+1 Selects, are detected and highlighted
• Identify new performance bottlenecks and regressions as a result of the changes
• Spot scaling issues earlier and address them as a part of the dev cycle

As Digma evolves, it continues to track and provide clear visibility into specific areas that are important to developers with the goal of having complete clarity about how each piece of code is behaving in real-world scenarios and catching issues and regressions much earlier in the process.

Who should use Digma?

Unlike many other observability solutions, Digma is code first and developer first. Digma is completely free for developers, does not require any code changes or sharing data, and will get you from zero to impactful data about your code within minutes.  If you are working on Java code, use the JetBrains IDE, and you want to improve your code with actual execution data, you can get started by picking up the Digma extension from the marketplace. 

You can provide feedback in our Slack channel and tell us where Digma improved your dev cycle.

Gartner predicts that “by 2027, over 90% of new software applications that are developed in the business will contain ML models or services as enterprises utilize the massive amounts of data available to the business.”

This article, written by our partner DataStax, outlines how Kaskada, open source, and Docker are helping developers optimize their AI/ML efforts.

Introduction

As a data scientist or machine learning practitioner, your work is all about experimentation. You start with a hunch about the story your data will tell, but often you’ll only find an answer after false starts and failed experiments. The faster you can iterate and try things, the faster you’ll get to answers. In many cases, the insights gained from solving one problem are applicable to other related problems. Experimentation can lead to results much faster when you’re able to build on the prior work of your colleagues.

But there are roadblocks to this kind of collaboration. Without the right tools, data scientists waste time managing code dependencies, resolving version conflicts, and repeatedly going through complex installation processes. Building on the work of colleagues can be hard due to incompatible environments — the dreaded “it works for me” syndrome.

Enter Docker and Kaskada, which offer a similar solution to these different problems: a declarative language designed specifically for the problem at hand and an ecosystem of supporting tools (Figure 1).

For Docker, the Dockerfile format describes the exact steps needed to build a reproducible development environment and an ecosystem of tools for working with containers (Docker Hub, Docker Desktop, Kubernetes, etc.). With Docker, data scientists can package their code and dependencies into an image that can run as a container on any machine, eliminating the need for complex installation processes and ensuring that colleagues can work with the exact same development environment.

With Kaskada, data scientists can compute and share features as code and use those throughout the ML lifecycle — from training models locally to maintaining real-time features in production. The computations required to produce these datasets are often complex and expensive because standard tools like Spark have difficulty reconstructing the temporal context required for training real-time ML models.

Kaskada solves this problem by providing a way to compute features — especially those that require reasoning about time — and sharing feature definitions as code. This approach allows data scientists to collaborate with each other and with machine learning engineers on feature engineering and reuse code across projects. Increased reproducibility dramatically speeds cycle times to get models into production, increases model accuracy, and ultimately improves machine learning results.

Example walkthrough

Let’s see how Docker and Kaskada improve the machine learning lifecycle by walking through a simplified example. Imagine you’re trying to build a real-time model for a mobile game and want to predict an outcome, for example, whether a user will pay for an upgrade.

Setting up your experimentation environment

To begin, start a Docker container that comes preinstalled with Jupyter and Kaskada:

docker run --rm -p 8888:8888 kaskadaio/jupyter
open <jupyter URL from logs> 

This step instantly gives you a reproducible development environment to work in, but you might want to customize this environment. Additional development tools can be added by creating a new Dockerfile using this image as the “base image”:

# Dockerfile
FROM kaskadaio/jupyter

COPY requirements.txt
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

In this example, you started with Jupyter and Kaskada, copied over a requirements file and installed all the dependencies in it. You now have a new Docker image that you can use as a data science workbench and share across your organization: Anyone in your organization with this Dockerfile can reproduce the same environment you’re using by building and running your Dockerfile.

docker build -t experimentation_env .
docker run --rm -p 8888:8888 experimentation_env

The power of Docker comes from the fact that you’ve created a file that describes your environment and now you can share this file with others.

Training your model

Inside a new Jupyter notebook, you can begin the process of exploring solutions to the problem — predicting purchase behavior. To begin, you’ll create tables to organize the different types of events produced by the imaginary game.

% pip install kaskada
% load_ext fenlmagic

session = LocalBuilder().build()

table.create_table(
table_name = "GamePlay",
time_column_name = "timestamp",
entity_key_column_name = "user_id",
)
table.create_table(
table_name = "Purchase",
time_column_name = "timestamp",
entity_key_column_name = "user_id",
)

table.load(
table_name = "GamePlay", 
file = "historical_game_play_events.parquet",
)
table.load(
table_name = "Purchase", 
file = "historical_purchase_events.parquet",
)

Kaskada is easy to install and use locally. After installing, you’re ready to start creating tables and loading event data into them. Kaskada’s vectorized engine is built for high-performance local execution, and, in many cases, you can start experimenting on your data locally, without the complexity of managing distributed compute clusters.

Kaskada’s query language was designed to make it easy for data scientists to build features and training examples directly from raw event data. A single query can replace complex ETL and pre-aggregation pipelines, and Kaskda’s unique temporal operations unlock native time travel for building training examples “as of” important times in the past.

%% fenl --var training

# Create views derived from the source tables
let GameVictory = GamePlay | when(GamePlay.won)
let GameDefeat = GamePlay | when(not GamePlay.won)

# Compute some features as inputs to our model
let features = {
  loss_duration: sum(GameVictory.duration),
  purchase_count: count(Purchase),
}

# Observe our features at the time of a player's second victory
let example = features
  | when(count(GameDefeat, window=since(GameVictory)) == 2)
  | shift_by(hours(1))

# Compute a target value
# In this case comparing purchase count at prediction and label time
let target = count(Purchase) > example.purchase_count

# Combine feature and target values computed at the different times
in extend(example, {target})

In the following example, you first apply filtering to the events, build simple features, observe them at the points in time when your model will be used to make predictions, then combine the features with the value you want to predict, computed an hour later. Kaskada lets you describe all these operations “from scratch,” starting with raw events and ending with an ML training dataset.

from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn import preprocessing

x = training.dataframe[['loss_duration']]
y = training.dataframe['target']

scaler = preprocessing.StandardScaler().fit(X)
X_scaled = scaler.transform(X)

model = LogisticRegression(max_iter=1000)
model.fit(X_scaled, y)

Kaskada’s query language makes it easy to write an end-to-end transformation from raw events to a training dataset.

Conclusion

Docker and Kaskada enable data scientists and ML engineers to solve real-time ML problems quickly and reproducibly. With Docker, you can manage your development environment with ease, ensuring that your code runs the same way on every machine. With Kaskada, you can collaborate with colleagues on feature engineering and reuse queries as code across projects. Whether you’re working independently or as part of a team, these tools can help you get answers faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Get started with Kaskada’s official images on Docker Hub.

Picture this scenario: You have a locally hosted web application that you need to test thoroughly, but accessing it remotely for testing purposes seems like an insurmountable task. This is where the Grafana Cloud Docker Extension comes to the rescue. This extension offers a seamless solution to the problem by establishing a secure connection between your local environment and the Grafana Cloud platform.

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of using the Grafana Cloud Docker Extension and describe how it can bridge the gap between your local machine and the remote Grafana Cloud platform.

Overview of Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-hosted observability platform ideal for cloud-native environments. With its robust features, wide user adoption, and comprehensive documentation, Grafana Cloud is a leading observability platform that empowers organizations to gain insights, make data-driven decisions, and ensure the reliability and performance of their applications and infrastructure.

Grafana Cloud is an open, composable observability stack that supports various popular data sources, such as Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Amazon CloudWatch, and more (Figure 1). By configuring these data sources, users can create custom dashboards, set up alerts, and visualize their data in real-time. The platform also offers performance and load testing with Grafana Cloud k6 and incident response and management with Grafana Incident and Grafana OnCall to enhance the observability experience.

Why run Grafana Cloud as a Docker Extension?

The Grafana Cloud Docker Extension is your gateway to seamless testing and monitoring, empowering you to make informed decisions based on accurate data and insights. The Docker Desktop integration in Grafana Cloud brings seamless monitoring capabilities to your local development environment. 

Docker Desktop, a user-friendly application for Mac, Windows, and Linux, enables you to containerize your applications and services effortlessly. With the Grafana Cloud extension integrated into Docker Desktop, you can now monitor your local Docker Desktop instance and gain valuable insights.

The following quick-start video shows how to monitor your local Docker Desktop instance using the Grafana Cloud Extension in Docker Desktop:

The Docker Desktop integration in Grafana Cloud provides a set of prebuilt Grafana dashboards specifically designed for monitoring Docker metrics and logs. These dashboards offer visual representations of essential Docker-related metrics, allowing you to track container resource usage, network activity, and overall performance. Additionally, the integration also includes monitoring for Linux host metrics and logs, providing a comprehensive view of your development environment.

Using the Grafana Cloud extension, you can visualize and analyze the metrics and logs generated by your Docker Desktop instance. This enables you to identify potential issues, optimize resource allocation, and ensure the smooth operation of your containerized applications and microservices.

Getting started

Prerequisites: Docker Desktop 4.8 or later and a Grafana Cloud account.

Note: You must ensure that the Docker Extension is enabled (Figure 2).

Step 1. Install the Grafana Cloud Docker Extension

In the Extensions Marketplace, search for Grafana and select Install (Figure 3).

Step 2. Create your Grafana Cloud account

A Grafana Cloud account is required to use the Docker Desktop integration. If you don’t have a Grafana Cloud account, you can sign up for a free account today (Figure 4).

Step 3. Find the Connections console

In your Grafana instance on Grafana Cloud, use the left-hand navigation bar to find the Connections Console (Home > Connections > Connect data) as shown in Figure 5.

Step 4. Install the Docker Desktop integration

To start sending metrics and logs to the Grafana Cloud, install the Docker Desktop integration (Figure 6). This integration lets you fetch the values of connection variables required to connect to your account.

Step 5. Connect your Docker Desktop instance to Grafana Cloud

It’s time to open and connect the Docker Desktop extension to the Grafana Cloud (Figure 7). Enter the connection variable you found while installing the Docker Desktop integration on Grafana Cloud.

Step 6. Check if Grafana Cloud is receiving data from Docker Desktop

Test the connection to ensure that the agent is collecting data (Figure 8).

Step 7. View the Grafana dashboard

The Grafana dashboard shows the integration with Docker Desktop (Figure 9).

Step 8. Start monitoring your Docker Desktop instance

After the integration is installed, the Docker Desktop extension will start sending metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud.

You will see three prebuilt dashboards installed in Grafana Cloud for Docker Desktop.

Docker Overview dashboard

This Grafana dashboard gives a general overview of the Docker Desktop instance based on the metrics exposed by the cadvisor Prometheus exporter (Figure 10).

The key metrics monitored are:

• Number of containers/images
• CPU metrics
• Memory metrics
• Network metrics

This dashboard also contains a shortcut at the top for the logs dashboard so you can correlate logs and metrics for troubleshooting.

Docker Logs dashboard

This Grafana dashboard provides logs and metrics related to logs of the running Docker containers on the Docker Desktop engine (Figure 11).

Logs and metrics can be filtered based on the Docker Desktop instance and the container using the drop-down for template variables on the top of the dashboard.

Docker Desktop Node Exporter/Nodes dashboard

This Grafana dashboard provides the metrics of the Linux virtual machine used to host the Docker engine for Docker Desktop (Figure 12).

How to monitor Redis in a Docker container with Grafana Cloud

Because the Grafana Agent is embedded inside the Grafana Cloud extension for Docker Desktop, it can easily be configured to monitor other systems running on Docker Desktop that are supported by the Grafana Agent.

For example, we can monitor a Redis instance running inside a container in Docker Desktop using the Redis integration for Grafana Cloud and the Docker Desktop extension.

If we have a Redis database running inside our Docker Desktop instance, we can install the Redis integration on Grafana Cloud by navigating to the Connections Console (Home > Connections > Connect data) and clicking on the Redis tile (Figure 13).

To start collecting metrics from the Redis server, we can copy the corresponding agent snippet into our agent configuration in the Docker Desktop extension. Click on Configuration in the Docker Desktop extension and add the following snippet under the integrations key. Then press Save configuration (Figure 14).

integrations:
  redis_exporter:
    enabled: true
    redis_addr: 'localhost:6379'

In its default settings, the Grafana agent container is not connected to the default bridge network of Docker desktop. To connect the agent to this container, run the following command:

docker network connect bridge grafana-docker-desktop-extension-agent

This step allows the agent to connect and scrape metrics from applications running on other containers. Now you can see Redis metrics on the dashboard installed as part of the Redis solution for Grafana Cloud (Figure 15).

Conclusion

With the Docker Desktop integration in Grafana Cloud and its prebuilt Grafana dashboards, monitoring your Docker Desktop environment becomes a streamlined process. The Grafana Cloud Docker Extension allows you to gain valuable insights into your local Docker instance, make data-driven decisions, and optimize your development workflow with the power of Grafana Cloud. Explore a new realm of testing possibilities and elevate your monitoring game to new heights. 

Check out the Grafana Cloud Docker Extension on Docker Hub.

This effort began in September of last year when we announced we were extending the integration of the Docker Engine with containerd. Since then, we have continued working on the image store integration and contributing this work to the Moby project. 

In this release, we are adding support for image history, pulling images from private repositories, image importing, and support for the classic builder when using the containerd image store.

Patch Release Update: Experiencing startup issues mentioning “An unexpected error occurred”? Try updating to the newest version! We’ve addressed this in our 4.20.1 patch release.

To explore and test these new features, activate the option Use containerd for pulling and storing images in the Features in Development panel within the Docker Desktop Settings (Figure 1). 

When enabling this feature, you will notice your existing images are no longer listed, but there’s no need to worry. The containerd image store functions differently from the classic store, and you can only view one of them at a time. Images in the classic store can be accessed again by disabling the feature.

On the other hand, if you want to transfer your existing images to the new containerd store, simply push your images to the Docker Hub using the command docker push <my image name>. Then, activate the containerd store in the Settings and pull the image using docker pull <my image name>.

You can read all bug fixes and enhancements in the Moby release notes.

SBOM and provenance attestations using BuildKit v0.11

BuildKit v0.11 helps you secure your software supply chain by allowing you to add an SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) and provenance attestations in the SLSA format to your container images. This can be done with the container driver as described in the blog post Generating SBOMs for Your Image with BuildKit or by enabling the containerd image store and following the steps in the SBOM attestations documentation.

New Dockerfile inspection features

In version 4.20, you can use the docker build command to preview the configuration of your upcoming build or view a list of available build targets in your Dockerfile. This is particularly beneficial when dealing with multi-stage Dockerfiles or when diving into new projects.

When you run the build command, it processes your Dockerfile, evaluates all environment variables, and determines reachable build stages, but stops before running the build steps. You can use --print=outline to get detailed information on all build arguments, secrets, and SSH forwarding keys, along with their current values. Alternatively, use --print=targets to list all the possible stages that can be built with the --target flag.

We also aim to present textual descriptions for these elements by parsing the comments in your Dockerfile. Currently, you need to define BUILDX_EXPERIMENTAL environment variable to use the --print flag (Figure 2).

Check out the Dockerfile 1.5 changelog for more updates, such as loading images from on-disk OCI layout and improved Git source and checksum validation for ADD commands in the labs channel. Read the Highlights from the BuildKit v0.11 Release blog post to learn more.

Docker Compose dry run

In our continued efforts to make Docker Compose better for developer workflows, we’re addressing a long-standing user request. You can now dry run any Compose command by adding a flag (--dry-run). This gives you insight on what exactly Compose will generate or execute so nothing unexpected happens.

We’re also excited to highlight contributions from the community, such as First implementation of viz subcommand #10376 by @BenjaminGuzman, which generates a graph of your stack, with details like networks and ports. Try docker compose alpha viz on your project to check out your own graph.

Conclusion

We love hearing your feedback. Please leave any feedback on our public GitHub roadmap and let us know what else you’d like to see. Check out the Docker Desktop 4.20 release notes for a full breakdown of what’s new in the latest release.