[fulafel]

Lots of people seem to be building containers with non-Dockerfile based things though, especially in the JVM world.

[random_kris]

You mean through maven configuration? At the end of the day it is still a dockerfile but constructed using Maven's xml.

I hate it haha

[tikkabhuna]

We use Google Jib with Gradle (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/jib) and love it. It does some slight optimisations (just use the classes rather than jars) and removes some decision making about where files are laid out.

It also builds into the Gradle lifecycle neatly. I don't need a separate tool for building images.

I'm sure writing Maven xml wouldn't be fun though!

[fulafel]

I thought at least some of those worked out without generating intermediate Dockerfiles or invoking "docker build". After all container images are just basically tar files with some metadata.

Or do you mean it's conceptually the same, just implemented differently? I agree there.