Compiling the Go Application for Containers
Learn how to compile the application to run in Linux containers.
We'll cover the following...
Overview
An alternative way to distribute your application that has become increasingly popular in recent years is allowing your users to run the application in Linux containers. Containers package your application and all the required dependencies using a standard image format, and they run the application in isolation from other processes running on the same system. Containers use Linux kernel resources such as Namespaces and Cgroups to provide isolation and resource management.
There are different container runtimes available, such as Podman and Docker. If you’re running these examples on a Linux system, you can use either one interchangeably. If you’re running on Windows or macOS, Docker provides a desktop version that makes it easier to start. You can also use Podman on these operating systems, but you need to install a Virtual Machine to enable it. But we don’t cover a container runtime installation process here. For more details, check the appropriate project documentation.
To distribute your application as a container, you have to create a container
image. You can do this in several ways, but a common way is by using a
Dockerfile, which contains a recipe for how to create an image. Then you pass
this file as input to docker or podman commands to build the image. For more
details on how to create the Dockerfile, consult its documentation.
The focus of this section is to provide some build options to optimize your application to run in containers. Go is a great choice for creating applications that run in containers because it generates a single binary file that you can add to the container image without additional runtimes or ...