Dockerfile Best Practices

Dockerfile Best Practices

Comprehensive guide for creating optimized, secure, and fast Docker images using modern BuildKit features.

Workflow

1. Identify language/framework → Pick a template from Language Templates
2. Apply essential rules → Every Dockerfile must follow Essential Rules
3. Security hardening → Non-root user, secret mounts, provenance and SBOM attestations (see references/supply_chain.md)
4. Optimize for cache → Separate deps from code, use cache mounts
5. Multi-stage if needed → Compiled languages or distroless runtime
6. Add metadata → OCI labels, HEALTHCHECK, STOPSIGNAL (see PID 1 and Signals)
7. Review → Run scripts/analyze_dockerfile.py, then docker build --check (see references/build_checks.md)

Essential Rules (Always Apply)

1. BuildKit syntax directive (first line, always)

# syntax=docker/dockerfile:1

2. Pin a readable tag you are willing to maintain

"Receives security patches" and "reproducible" are properties of a process, not of a tag string. A floating tag patches nothing by itself: it patches when someone rebuilds.

• Pin a tag as specific as you are willing to maintain. python:3.12-slim is fine. python:3.12-slim-bookworm is equally fine: pinning the OS is a legitimate stability choice, not a mistake.
• :latest and untagged images stay rejected. Not because mutability is uniquely evil there, but because they carry zero information about what you are actually running.
• Every tag is mutable, and security updates come from rebuilding regularly. Rebuild in six months and you may get different bytes. A tag is documentation and a rough contract, not a reproducibility mechanism. Name the process, not the string.
• Reproducibility comes from a process: digest pinning backed by Renovate or Dependabot, or recording the resolved digest in build metadata, which is what provenance attestations already do (references/supply_chain.md).
• Digests are an option, not the default. Strongest guarantee available, but without renewal automation a digest is just a tag that rots silently while you ship known CVEs feeling safe. Most teams lack that automation. Adopt digests only with the tooling that renews them.

Full argument and the digest tradeoff: references/best_practices.md.

3. Cache mounts for all package managers

# pip
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache/pip pip install -r requirements.txt
# npm
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.npm npm ci --omit=dev
# yarn (Yarn 2+; --frozen-lockfile is the retired Yarn 1 spelling)
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.yarn yarn install --immutable
# go
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/go/pkg/mod go mod download
# cargo
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/usr/local/cargo/registry cargo build --release
# composer
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/tmp/cache composer install --no-dev
# maven
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.m2 mvn package -DskipTests

4. APT cache setup (before any apt operation on Debian-based images)

RUN rm -f /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/docker-clean; \
    echo 'Binary::apt::APT::Keep-Downloaded-Packages "true";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/keep-cache

RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/var/cache/apt,sharing=locked \
    --mount=type=cache,target=/var/lib/apt,sharing=locked \
    apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends curl

5. Never use ARG/ENV for secrets

# ✅ GOOD - secret mount
RUN --mount=type=secret,id=api_key \
    curl -H "Authorization: $(cat /run/secrets/api_key)" https://api.example.com

# ❌ BAD - exposed in image history
ARG API_KEY

6. Non-root user with UID/GID >10000

# Debian/Ubuntu
RUN groupadd -r -g 10001 app && useradd -r -u 10001 -g app app

# Alpine
RUN addgroup -g 10001 app && adduser -u 10001 -G app -S app

Above 10000 keeps the container user from colliding with a real host account once a volume is bind-mounted. Some images ship a non-root user below that line (node is UID 1000); prefer your own unless the image hard-codes ownership of paths you need.

Distroless is the exception: it has no groupadd, so use a :nonroot tag and name the user numerically (USER 65532:65532). Kubernetes runAsNonRoot cannot verify a username.

7. COPY for local files, ADD --checksum for remote artifacts

• COPY for anything coming from the build context.
• ADD --checksum=sha256:<hash> <url> <dest> for a remote artifact. BuildKit verifies the digest before writing, which is strictly better than RUN curl | tar: that pipes an unverified download straight into a shell.
• Never ADD a local archive you did not build. Auto-extraction is implicit and can write outside the destination you named.

8. Create the user before any --chown that names it

--chown=app:app resolves app against this stage's /etc/passwd. If the RUN that creates app has not run yet, the modern BuildKit frontend does not fail: it silently drops the --chown and copies the files as root. The build stays green, docker build --check sees nothing, and you ship an image where the app runs as app while its own files are owned by root: it works until the first write, which fails at runtime, maybe in production, maybe never. Order every stage:

1. Create the user.
2. Install dependencies as root, so the app cannot rewrite its own deps at runtime.
3. COPY --chown=app:app the application source.
4. Hand over the workdir itself (chown app:app /app), not the dependency tree.
5. USER app last.

Use COPY --chown=app:app . . rather than COPY plus RUN chown -R: the latter copies every file into a second layer, doubling its weight in the image.

9. OCI labels for metadata

LABEL org.opencontainers.image.source="https://github.com/org/repo" \
      org.opencontainers.image.description="My application" \
      org.opencontainers.image.version="1.0.0"

10. HEALTHCHECK: call a binary the image actually ships

Kubernetes ignores Docker's HEALTHCHECK entirely and runs its own probes. This rule matters for Compose, plain docker run, and Swarm. On a cluster, write probes instead.

Two ways to get it wrong:

• Calling a binary that is not there. wget is not in python:3.12-slim, or any Debian slim image. It exists on Alpine only because busybox provides it. Use the runtime the image already has.
• Passing on a non-2xx response. A check that fails only on connection refused reports a 500-ing app as healthy. requests.get() does not raise on HTTP 500 (raise_for_status() does); fetch() resolves on 500 too.

# Python: urlopen raises HTTPError on non-2xx, so no explicit status check needed.
HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=3s --start-period=10s --retries=3 \
  CMD python -c "import urllib.request as u; u.urlopen('http://localhost:8000/health').read()" || exit 1

# Node: fetch resolves on 500, so check r.ok explicitly.
HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=3s --start-period=10s --retries=3 \
  CMD node -e "fetch('http://localhost:3000/health').then(r=>process.exit(r.ok?0:1)).catch(()=>process.exit(1))"

# Distroless/scratch: no shell, no interpreter. Ship a subcommand, exec form.
HEALTHCHECK CMD ["/app", "healthcheck"]

If the image genuinely cannot check itself (php-fpm speaks FastCGI and ships no FastCGI client), omit the HEALTHCHECK rather than installing a whole HTTP client to satisfy it.

11. Create .dockerignore

Use the template in assets/dockerignore-template. Critical for build context size and security.

PID 1 and Signals

PID 1 is special: the kernel installs no default signal handlers for it. An app that registers no SIGTERM handler does not die on docker stop, it ignores it. Docker waits out the full grace period (10s by default), then SIGKILLs: no clean shutdown, no connection draining, ten seconds burned per deploy. PID 1 must also reap orphaned children, which most runtimes never do, so zombies accumulate.

In preference order:

1. Handle SIGTERM in the application. Nothing else shuts down cleanly.
2. docker run --init (Compose: init: true) injects a minimal init as PID 1 that forwards signals and reaps.
3. ENTRYPOINT ["/sbin/tini", "--"], or dumb-init, when it must be baked into the image.

Always use the exec form of CMD/ENTRYPOINT: shell form wraps the command in /bin/sh -c, and that shell becomes PID 1 and forwards nothing. Set STOPSIGNAL when the app listens for something else (nginx and php-fpm want SIGQUIT to drain gracefully):

STOPSIGNAL SIGQUIT

Depth: references/best_practices.md.

Language Templates

Six ready-to-copy templates live in references/templates.md, each applying every rule above. Load that file when you know the stack; do not reconstruct a template from the rules.

Python specifics beyond the template: references/uv_integration.md.

Docker Compose Rules

1. No version:: a Compose V1 leftover, deprecated since V2.
2. container_name: only where you have a reason: it blocks --scale on that service. A single-instance service you address by name from scripts is a legitimate reason; habit is not.
3. depends_on with condition: service_healthy: bare depends_on waits for the container to start, not for the service to become usable.
4. File name: follow the project, ask once, then remember. Compose V2 looks for compose.yaml first, then compose.yml, docker-compose.yaml, docker-compose.yml. All four work, so this is a convention question, not a correctness one. Resolve it in this order:
   1. A Compose file already exists in the project: match it. Never rename an existing file as a side effect of an unrelated edit.
   2. A recorded preference exists (agent memory, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md): use it, silently.
   3. Neither: ask the user which of the four they want, then record the answer where this agent persists preferences so it is asked once, not every time. compose.yaml is the canonical form and the right default to recommend, but recommend it, do not impose it.

Health checks, networks, volumes, secrets, runtime hardening, dev vs prod, scaling, and the full container_name tradeoff: references/compose_best_practices.md.

Commands Reference

# Review before building: this skill's linter, then BuildKit's own checks.
# uv run resolves each script's PEP 723 dependencies; plain python will not.
uv run scripts/analyze_dockerfile.py ./Dockerfile
uv run scripts/analyze_compose.py ./compose.yaml
docker buildx build --check .

# Compose: schema/interpolation validation, no linter needed for this step
docker compose config --quiet

# Compose: third-party linter (references/compose_best_practices.md#linting)
npx dclint compose.yaml

# hadolint: the one tool that lints shell inside RUN (embeds ShellCheck)
docker run --rm -i hadolint/hadolint < Dockerfile

# Build: with a secret mount (rule 5), and multi-platform
docker buildx build --secret id=api_key,src=./key.txt -t myapp:1.0.0 .
docker buildx build --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64 -t myapp:1.0.0 --push .

Remote cache (--cache-from / --cache-to) and the rest of the buildx surface: references/optimization_guide.md.

Reference Documentation