Yes, yes, I know, this is not a proper blog if I don’t post often. But hey, that’s the name of the game, when you’re working on fun stuff!

Talking about fun stuff - have you ever tried to dockerize your Go app? Probably it’s easy, there’s a ton of Medium posts on how to do that. But what to do when one of your packages is behind the private organisation?

How to dockerize an app which uses private libraries?⌗

Well, that was a thing, that took me a few days to figure out. I’m not a Docker master, and I’m more than 100% sure, that it can be done sexier than this. Ok, let’s go!

# Part I
FROM alpine/git AS prebuild
WORKDIR  /go/src/github.com/<package>
ARG GIT_USERNAME
ARG GIT_PASSWORD
RUN git clone https://${GIT_USERNAME}:${GIT_PASSWORD}@your.private.git/and/amazing/package

# Part II
FROM golang:1.13.8-alpine
RUN apk add git
COPY --from=prebuild /go/src/github.com /go/src/github.com
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN go get -d -v
RUN go build -o your-app .
EXPOSE 6661

CMD ["./your-app"]

So, as you probably can see, I’m not using go modules. Well, it’s my private thing (had more problems than solved issues with them, so until they’re not in better shape…) so I’m going with oldschool approach and doing go get myself. Let’s dive into separate parts then!

Part I - Get the private repo⌗

FROM alpine/git AS prebuild
WORKDIR  /go/src/github.com/ecs-digital/Smart-Explorer
ARG GIT_USERNAME
ARG GIT_PASSWORD
RUN git clone https://${GIT_USERNAME}:${GIT_PASSWORD}@github.ecs-digital.co.uk/ECSD/ExplorationEngine
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/jinzhu
RUN git clone -b master https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm.git

First bit is rather easy - we’re using the lightest container that allows us to use git.

Now we need to figure out how we can authorize our call to GitHub to get the repo. We could hardcode our GIT_USERNAME and GIT_PASSWORD but that’s a proper security breach and we don’t like it. So, we’re passing the username-password combo as parameters during the build and by the power of multi-stage build, we’re hiding all the keys in the first stage - the only visible thing when doing docker history IMAGE_ID would be the second part, not the bit when we authorize ourselves!

Part II - Do the rest⌗

FROM golang:1.13.8-alpine
RUN apk add git
COPY --from=prebuild /go/src/github.com /go/src/github.com
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN go get -d -v
RUN go build -o your-app .
EXPOSE 6661

CMD ["./your-app"]

The rest is rather standard - get git in our container to allow go get to work, we’re copying pre-stage build (look at the prebuild tag) and building our app! Simple as that!

Is it worth it?⌗

Well, yes. If you’re working in an organisation that has it’s own private repos, this might be your salvation (until go modules will work it out and allow us to authenticate…).

If you have any questions, or you maybe see something fixable here - get me on Twitter @arturkondas - I’m more than hapy to help and to learn new stuff!