Recently, while drafting an OpenShift solution tutorial, I explored an interesting tool called S2I (Source-to-Image). In this post, you will learn how to create a container image directly from your source code and push the generated container image to a private IBM Cloud Container registry.
You may also enjoy: How to Create a Builder Image With S2I
What is S2I (Source-to-Image)?
S2I is a tool for building reproducible, Docker-formatted container images. It produces ready-to-run images by injecting application source into a container image and assembling a new image. The new image incorporates the base image (the builder) and built source and is ready to use with the docker run
command. S2I supports incremental builds, which reuses previously downloaded dependencies, previously built artifacts, etc.
Installation and Setup
Let’s start by installing S2I on your machine.
You can install the s2i binary using go get
, which will download the source-to-image code into your $GOPATH
, build the s2i binary, and install it into your $GOPATH/bin
:
go get github.com/openshift/source-to-image/cmd/s2i
For Mac, you can either follow the installation instructions for Linux (and use the darwin-amd64 link) or you can just install Source-to-Image with Homebrew:
brew install source-to-image
Follow the instructions here to install on other operating systems. To confirm the installation, run this command on a terminal or command prompt:
s2i
Follow the instructions mentioned in the link here to set up the IBM Cloud Container Registry CLI and your registry namespace.
export MYNAMESPACE=<YOUR_REGISTRY_NAMESPACE>
Once created, open the terminal and export the MYNAMESPACE
environment variable pointing to your Registry namespace:
cat Dockerfile
Let’s Build
The s2i build
command provides two options to generate a new container image:
Build a Docker image from a remote Git repository:
s2i build https://github.com/IBM-Cloud/get-started-node nodeshift/centos7-s2i-nodejs:latest us.icr.io/$MYNAMESPACE/webapp
Build from a local directory. If this directory is a git repo, the current commit will be built:
Clone the get-started-node
Git repo and run the below command
s2i build . nodeshift/centos7-s2i-nodejs:latest us.icr.io/$MYNAMESPACE/webapplocal
Even before building an image, you can see the generated Dockerfile by appending --as-dockerfile Dockerfile
to your build commands. Once generated, check the contents of the generated Dockerfile.
To understand the S2I requirements and the artifacts of the generated Dockerfile, see the documentation.
Run the App Locally and Push It to Private Registry
Check the generated Docker image by running it locally with the following command:
docker run -p 3000:3000 -it us.icr.io/$MYNAMESPACE/webapp

Push the container image to the private IBM Cloud Container Registry. Don’t forget to log into the container registry with ibmcloud cr login
command:
docker push us.icr.io/$MYNAMESPACE/webapp
You can check the container image by running the following command:
ibmcloud cr images
What’s Next?
Follow the steps mentioned in the solution tutorial to deploy the generated container image as a new app on OpenShift. Also, learn to create a scalable web application on OpenShift in this solution tutorial.

Further Reading
How to Deploy a Container to The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Kubernetes vs OpenShift: What Is the Difference?
from DZone Cloud Zone: https://dzone.com/articles/build-a-container-image-from-source-code-using-s2i?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedpress.me&utm_campaign=Feed:+dzone%2Fcloud