HashiCorp Waypoint Image Tagging

Recently (October, 2020) I posted an introduction to HashiCorp Waypoint on my YouTube channel. It shows how to build, push, deploy and release applications to Kubernetes with a single waypoint up command. If you want to check out that video first, see below ⬇⬇⬇

After watching that video, it should be clear that you drive the process from a file called waypoint.hcl. The waypoint.hcl to deploy the Azure Function app in the video, is shown below:

project = "wptest-hello"

app "wptest-hello" {
  labels = {
    "service" = "wptest-hello",
    "env" = "dev"
  }

  build {
    use "docker" {}
    registry {
        use "docker" {
          image = "gbaeke/wptest-hello"
          tag = "latest"
          local = false
        }
    }
  }

  deploy {
    use "kubernetes" {
        service_port = 80
        probe_path = "/"
    }
  }

  release {
    use "kubernetes" {
       load_balancer =  true
    }
  }
}

In the build stanza, use “docker” tells Waypoint to build the container image from a local Dockerfile. With registry, we push that image to, in this case, Docker Hub. Instead of Docker Hub, other registries can be used as well. Before the image is pushed to the registry, it is first tagged with the tag you specify. Here, that is the latest tag. Although that is easy, you should not use that tag in your workflow because you will not get different images per application version. And you certainly want that when you do multiple deploys based on different code.

To make the tag unique, you can replace “latest” with the gitrefpretty() function, as shown below:

build {
    use "docker" {}
    registry {
        use "docker" {
          image = "gbaeke/wptest-hello"
          tag = gitrefpretty()
          local = false
        }
    }
  }

Assuming you work with git and commit your code changes 😉, gitrefpretty() will return the git commit sha at the time of build.

You can check the commit sha of each commit with git log:

When you use gitrefpretty() and you issue the waypoint build command, the images will be tagged with the sha-1 checksum. In Docker Hub, that is clearly shown:

That’s it for this quick post. If you have further questions, just hit me up on Twitter or leave a comment!