cb-cli - An Unofficial CLI tool for Google Cloud Container Builder

Google Cloud Container Builder is a powerful tool for building Container Images quickly and efficiently from source and storing them in Google Container Registry (GCR). While Container Builder supports Dockerfiles to configure builds it also supports other methods of building images more safely and efficiently.

This CLI provides a handy mechanism for accessing the API for building Container images from local source, and introduces Buildfiles for describing Container Builder configurations.

Installation

The recommended way to install this tool is from pypy via pip.

sudo pip install cbcli

NB. OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) has a known issue where an earlier dependency of cbcli (the six library) has been pre-installed, and cannot be uninstalled. To avoid this, install with:

sudo pip install cbcli --ignore-installed six

Authentication

This tool uses Application Default Credentials to authenticate to the Google Cloud Platform. To use these, download the Google Cloud SDK and run:

gcloud beta auth application-default login

prior to running the script. Read more on Google's documentation

You might also want to set your project ID for the tool to use if you don't want to keep passing it on the command line each time. You can do that with:

export GCP_PROJECT_ID=your-project-id

Basic Usage

To build a Container Image from source, add a Buildfile to the base directory of the application's source tree, then run the Container Builder CLI.

cbcli gcr.io/your-project-id/image-name

The Buildfile describes how your source code should be transformed into a Docker image, and is run remotely using the Cloud Container Builder service.

Buildfiles

Buildfiles describe a set of build steps that are run in serial against your source tree to produce a Docker image.

To help get you started, here are some useful Buildfiles.

• Build any Docker container from a Dockerfile Buildfile
• Build a lean Spring Boot application from source using a Maven pom.xml file Buildfile
• Build with an OpenShift Source-to-Image builder Buildfile
• Build a Node.js application from a Gulp configuration file Buildfile

A build step is itself simply a Docker image within which your source will be transiently mounted in a special directory. You can customize the arguments, environment variables and parameters used to invoke a build step, making them easy to configure.