The project's README from github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kaniko. As one markdown file: README.md.
The code remains available for historic purposes.
The README as of the archival date remains unchanged below for historic purposes.

kaniko is a tool to build container images from a Dockerfile, inside a container or Kubernetes cluster.
kaniko doesn't depend on a Docker daemon and executes each command within a Dockerfile completely in userspace. This enables building container images in environments that can't easily or securely run a Docker daemon, such as a standard Kubernetes cluster.
kaniko is meant to be run as an image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor. We do
not recommend running the kaniko executor binary in another image, as it
might not work as you expect - see Known Issues.
We'd love to hear from you! Join us on #kaniko Kubernetes Slack
:mega: Please fill out our quick 5-question survey so that we can learn how satisfied you are with kaniko, and what improvements we should make. Thank you! :dancers:
If you are interested in contributing to kaniko, see DEVELOPMENT.md and CONTRIBUTING.md.
Table of Contents generated with DocToc
--build-arg--cache--cache-dir--cache-repo--cache-copy-layers--cache-run-layers--cache-ttl duration--cleanup--compressed-caching--context-sub-path--custom-platform--digest-file--dockerfile--force--git--image-name-with-digest-file--image-name-tag-with-digest-file--insecure--insecure-pull--insecure-registry--label--log-format--log-timestamp--no-push--no-push-cache--oci-layout-path--push-retry--registry-certificate--registry-client-cert--registry-map--registry-mirror--skip-default-registry-fallback--reproducible--single-snapshot--skip-push-permission-check--skip-tls-verify--skip-tls-verify-pull--skip-tls-verify-registry--skip-unused-stages--snapshot-mode--tar-path--target--use-new-run--verbosity--ignore-var-run--ignore-path--image-fs-extract-retry--image-download-retryWe'd love to hear from you! Join #kaniko on Kubernetes Slack
The kaniko executor image is responsible for building an image from a Dockerfile and pushing it to a registry. Within the executor image, we extract the filesystem of the base image (the FROM image in the Dockerfile). We then execute the commands in the Dockerfile, snapshotting the filesystem in userspace after each one. After each command, we append a layer of changed files to the base image (if there are any) and update image metadata.

For a detailed example of kaniko with local storage, please refer to a getting started tutorial.
Please see References for more docs & video tutorials
To use kaniko to build and push an image for you, you will need:
kaniko's build context is very similar to the build context you would send your
Docker daemon for an image build; it represents a directory containing a
Dockerfile which kaniko will use to build your image. For example, a COPY
command in your Dockerfile should refer to a file in the build context.
You will need to store your build context in a place that kaniko can access. Right now, kaniko supports these storage solutions:
Note about Local Directory: this option refers to a directory within the kaniko container. If you wish to use this option, you will need to mount in your build context into the container as a directory.
Note about Local Tar: this option refers to a tar gz file within the kaniko container. If you wish to use this option, you will need to mount in your build context into the container as a file.
Note about Standard Input: the only Standard Input allowed by kaniko is in
.tar.gz format.
If using a GCS or S3 bucket, you will first need to create a compressed tar of your build context and upload it to your bucket. Once running, kaniko will then download and unpack the compressed tar of the build context before starting the image build.
To create a compressed tar, you can run:
tar -C <path to build context> -zcvf context.tar.gz .
Then, copy over the compressed tar into your bucket. For example, we can copy over the compressed tar to a GCS bucket with gsutil:
gsutil cp context.tar.gz gs://<bucket name>
When running kaniko, use the --context flag with the appropriate prefix to
specify the location of your build context:
| Source | Prefix | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Local Directory | dir://[path to a directory in the kaniko container] | dir:///workspace |
| Local Tar Gz | tar://[path to a .tar.gz in the kaniko container] | tar:///path/to/context.tar.gz |
| Standard Input | tar://[stdin] | tar://stdin |
| GCS Bucket | gs://[bucket name]/[path to .tar.gz] | gs://kaniko-bucket/path/to/context.tar.gz |
| S3 Bucket | s3://[bucket name]/[path to .tar.gz] | s3://kaniko-bucket/path/to/context.tar.gz |
| Azure Blob Storage | https://[account].[azureblobhostsuffix]/[container]/[path to .tar.gz] | https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/container/path/to/context.tar.gz |
| Git Repository | git://[repository url][#reference][#commit-id] | git://github.com/acme/myproject.git#refs/heads/mybranch#<desired-commit-id> |
If you don't specify a prefix, kaniko will assume a local directory. For
example, to use a GCS bucket called kaniko-bucket, you would pass in
--context=gs://kaniko-bucket/path/to/context.tar.gz.
If you are using Azure Blob Storage for context file, you will need to pass
Azure Storage Account Access Key
as an environment variable named AZURE_STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY through Kubernetes
Secrets
You can use Personal Access Tokens for Build Contexts from Private
Repositories from
GitHub.
You can either pass this in as part of the git URL (e.g.,
git://[email protected]/acme/myproject.git#refs/heads/mybranch) or using the
environment variable GIT_TOKEN.
You can also pass GIT_USERNAME and GIT_PASSWORD (password being the token)
if you want to be explicit about the username.
If running kaniko and using Standard Input build context, you will need to add
the docker or kubernetes -i, --interactive flag. Once running, kaniko will
then get the data from STDIN and create the build context as a compressed tar.
It will then unpack the compressed tar of the build context before starting the
image build. If no data is piped during the interactive run, you will need to
send the EOF signal by yourself by pressing Ctrl+D.
Complete example of how to interactively run kaniko with .tar.gz Standard
Input data, using docker:
echo -e 'FROM alpine \nRUN echo "created from standard input"' > Dockerfile | tar -cf - Dockerfile | gzip -9 | docker run \
--interactive -v $(pwd):/workspace gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest \
--context tar://stdin \
--destination=<gcr.io/$project/$image:$tag>
Complete example of how to interactively run kaniko with .tar.gz Standard
Input data, using Kubernetes command line with a temporary container and
completely dockerless:
echo -e 'FROM alpine \nRUN echo "created from standard input"' > Dockerfile | tar -cf - Dockerfile | gzip -9 | kubectl run kaniko \
--rm --stdin=true \
--image=gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest --restart=Never \
--overrides='{
"apiVersion": "v1",
"spec": {
"containers": [
{
"name": "kaniko",
"image": "gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest",
"stdin": true,
"stdinOnce": true,
"args": [
"--dockerfile=Dockerfile",
"--context=tar://stdin",
"--destination=gcr.io/my-repo/my-image"
],
"volumeMounts": [
{
"name": "cabundle",
"mountPath": "/kaniko/ssl/certs/"
},
{
"name": "docker-config",
"mountPath": "/kaniko/.docker/"
}
]
}
],
"volumes": [
{
"name": "cabundle",
"configMap": {
"name": "cabundle"
}
},
{
"name": "docker-config",
"configMap": {
"name": "docker-config"
}
}
]
}
}'
There are several different ways to deploy and run kaniko:
Requirements:
To run kaniko in a Kubernetes cluster, you will need a standard running Kubernetes cluster and a Kubernetes secret, which contains the auth required to push the final image.
To create a secret to authenticate to Google Cloud Registry, follow these steps:
Storage Admin permissions.kaniko-secret.jsonkubectl create secret generic kaniko-secret --from-file=<path to kaniko-secret.json>
Note: If using a GCS bucket in the same GCP project as a build context, this service account should now also have permissions to read from that bucket.
The Kubernetes Pod spec should look similar to this, with the args parameters filled in:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: kaniko
spec:
containers:
- name: kaniko
image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest
args:
- "--dockerfile=<path to Dockerfile within the build context>"
- "--context=gs://<GCS bucket>/<path to .tar.gz>"
- "--destination=<gcr.io/$PROJECT/$IMAGE:$TAG>"
volumeMounts:
- name: kaniko-secret
mountPath: /secret
env:
- name: GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
value: /secret/kaniko-secret.json
restartPolicy: Never
volumes:
- name: kaniko-secret
secret:
secretName: kaniko-secret
This example pulls the build context from a GCS bucket. To use a local directory build context, you could consider using configMaps to mount in small build contexts.
Running kaniko in gVisor provides an
additional security boundary. You will need to add the --force flag to run
kaniko in gVisor, since currently there isn't a way to determine whether or not
a container is running in gVisor.
docker run --runtime=runsc -v $(pwd):/workspace -v ~/.config:/root/.config \
gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest \
--dockerfile=<path to Dockerfile> --context=/workspace \
--destination=gcr.io/my-repo/my-image --force
We pass in --runtime=runsc to use gVisor. This example mounts the current
directory to /workspace for the build context and the ~/.config directory
for GCR credentials.
Requirements:
To run kaniko in GCB, add it to your build config as a build step:
steps:
- name: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:latest
args:
[
"--dockerfile=<path to Dockerfile within the build context>",
"--context=dir://<path to build context>",
"--destination=<gcr.io/$PROJECT/$IMAGE:$TAG>",
]
kaniko will build and push the final image in this build step.
Requirements:
We can run the kaniko executor image locally in a Docker daemon to build and push an image from a Dockerfile.
For example, when using gcloud and GCR you could run kaniko as follows:
docker run \
-v "$HOME"/.config/gcloud:/roo