Docker Bake in Practice — Part 1: From Bash Scripts to Declarative Builds

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Practical guide to Docker Bake, directly actionable for improving build pipelines with declarative configs.

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Why It Matters

For platform engineers managing complex multi-service builds, Bake eliminates fragile 200-line bash scripts and provides a declarative, testable orchestration layer that integrates natively with BuildKit's parallelism and your CI/CD pipeline.

Key Takeaways

Migrate your build orchestration from bash scripts to Bake HCL files for deterministic, multi-target builds with parallel stages, caching, and built-in CI/CD integration.

Docker Bake in Practice — Part 1: From Bash Scripts to Declarative Builds

Summary

Docker Bake replaces fragile bash scripts with declarative HCL files for multi-target image builds, leveraging BuildKit's parallel execution and cache mounts. This first part of a two-part series covers Bake fundamentals like variable interpolation, file inheritance, and matrix builds, with a companion repository demonstrating registry-agnostic workflows (GAR, Docker Hub, ECR) and CI integration (Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Dagger) slated for Part 2. All examples use Docker Engine 23+'s default BuildKit engine, and Bake's --print flag enables inspection of resolved configurations.

Author

Mazlum Tosun