do not add .git folder to a build layer

[nagimov]

.git folder isn't present in tarballs pulled from releases, e.g. wget https://github.com/umputun/remark/archive/v.1.2.1.tar.gz, and not used during the build anyways

[umputun]

not sure why it has anything to do with tarballs. They supposed to use $DRONE_TAG to form the version, but not .git. This part never worked properly because I'll need some sort of artifact storage on drone side and upload those artifacts to release. I have tried to implement it, but obviously, something is not right here and it doesn't keep/publish them to github properly.

regarding the conclusion - I agree, .git seems to be an artifact of some legacy method to get version number for local builds, but we don't use it anymore (defaulted to "local").

[nc7s]

It's still here on master, as of now:

remark42/Dockerfile

Line 11 in 20ca089

ADD .git/ /build/backend/.git/

If it's just for a revision number, could it be done using the git command?

[umputun]

git command won't work without .git folder.

[nc7s]

How about running the scripts locally then copying the results over?

[umputun]

it means more complicated build process. I don't really see a reason to overcomplicate things. Build layer doesn't affect the final size of the container anyway

[nagimov]

my two cents: having ADD .git breaks this workflow:

VER=1.10.0
mkdir ${VER}
wget https://github.com/umputun/remark42/archive/refs/tags/v${VER}.tar.gz
tar -xvf *.tar.gz -C ${VER}
cd ${VER}/*
docker build -t ${VER} .

since .git folder isn't included in release tarballs:

...
Step 9/53 : ADD .git/ /build/backend/.git/
ADD failed: file not found in build context or excluded by .dockerignore: stat .git/: file does not exist

[umputun]

ah, I see. Have not thought anyone actually using tarballs instead of git checkout, but it is a valid concern for sure. I don't want to create some special make's target for the primary docker build and would rather prefer some special target to build container from the non-git source.

[nagimov]

For reference, .git directory was removed from the Dockerfile by this PR (#269) back in 2019 since it wasn't used in the Dockerfile then. It was re-introduced by aea7724 that started using git-rev.sh to fetch the git version and tag the build with it.

I see two ways of solving this (assuming it actually needs "solving"):

1. stop using git-rev.sh and always tag builds with version="local" the way it used to work prior to aea7724
2. make git-rev.sh fall back to version="local" if .git isn't found, and make Dockerfile copy .git conditionally only if it exists (not supported by docker officially although hacky workarounds exist)

I fixed this for myself with sed 's/...' Dockerfile before building it 😄

[nc7s]

Yeah, @nagimov made the point. I was trying to deploy it to Railway, and saw the same error, but the case wasn't as persuasive as tarballs.

Anyway, if all you need is branch-hash-timestamp, it could be done locally using $(git branch --show-current)-$(git log -1 --format=%h)-$(date +%Y%m%dT%H:%M:%S). You are sending the same work directory to build after all. This could be run before docker build, setting an env var, then ENV BUILD_TAG in Dockerfile.

[nagimov]

+1 for @bnoctis cleaner solution. Version ENV can be set via git in the Makefile and passed to docker build --build-arg ...
I would also add something like [[ -z "$version" ]] || version="local" to the Dockerfile to allow for unset ENV