Build Context

When Aptible builds your Docker image using Dockerfile Deploy, the build context contains the git repository you pushed and a .aptible.env file injected by Aptible at the root of your repository.

Here are a few caveats you should be mindful of:

Git clone is a shallow clone

When Aptible ships your git repository to a build instance, it uses a git shallow clone.

This has no impact on the code being cloned, but you should be mindful that using e.g. git log within your container will yield a single commit: the one you deployed from.

File timestamps are all set to January 1st, 2000

Git does not preserve timestamps on files. This means that when we clone a git repository, the timestamps on your files represent when the files were cloned, as opposed to when you last modified them.

However, Docker caching relies on timestamps (i.e. a different timestamp will break the Docker build cache), so timestamps that reflect the time of clone would break Docker caching.

So, in order to optimize your build times, Aptible sets all the timestamps on all files in your repository to an arbitrary timestamp: January 1st, 2000, at 00:00 UTC.

.dockerignore is not used

The .dockerignore file is read by the Docker CLI client, not by the Docker server.

However, Aptible does not use the Docker CLI client, and does not currently use the .dockerignore file.