cloudfoundry/cnb

cloudfoundry/cnb repository overview

⁠Quick Reference

Buildpacks.io⁠ → Cloud Native Buildpack website
Pack – Buildpack CLI⁠ → CLI used to consume the builder, along with source code, and construct an OCI image
CNB Tutorial⁠ → Tutorial to get you started using pack, this builder, and your application to create a working OCI image
Buildpack & Platform Specification⁠ → Detailed definition of the interaction between a platform, a lifecycle, Cloud Native Buildpacks, and an application
Get help from the Cloud Foundry Slack⁠, and if you have any specific issues with a CNB, file an issue in the appropriate github repo.

⁠What are Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs)?

⁠CNBs are modular components used to turn your app source code into a runnable OCI image.

Buildpacks, in general, provide a higher-level abstraction for building apps compared to Dockerfiles. Cloud Native Buildpacks, a project initiated by Pivotal and Heroku, is a member of the Cloud Native Sandbox⁠. The project unifies the buildpack ecosystem, through a platform-to-buildpack contract that embraces modern container standards, specifically the OCI image format.

⁠What are these images (cloudfoundry/cnb)?

These images, called builders, contain internal operating system images (see the below sections for differences), the lifecycle executables for your application, and a collection of Cloud Native Buildpacks, all structured according to the CNB specification⁠. These are created by⁠, and consumed by⁠, the pack CLI⁠.

The different tags refer to differences in the underlying file-system, which supports different operating systems:

base⁠ → A minimal image based on Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver), with the addition of a few packages (called mixins⁠) - notably, git and build-essentials (added in order to successfully run go applications).
full⁠ → An image based on Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) supplemented with additional packages⁠.
tiny⁠ → A minimal build image (same as base), with a tiny, distroless-like run image based on Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).