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Bake targets

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A target in a Bake file represents a build invocation. It holds all the information you would normally pass to a docker build command using flags.

docker-bake.hcl

target "webapp" {
  dockerfile = "webapp.Dockerfile"
  tags = ["docker.io/username/webapp:latest"]
  context = "https://github.com/username/webapp"
}

To build a target with Bake, pass name of the target to the bake command.

$ docker buildx bake webapp

You can build multiple targets at once by passing multiple target names to the bake command.

$ docker buildx bake webapp api tests

Default target

If you don't specify a target when running docker buildx bake, Bake will build the target named default.

docker-bake.hcl

target "default" {
  dockerfile = "webapp.Dockerfile"
  tags = ["docker.io/username/webapp:latest"]
  context = "https://github.com/username/webapp"
}

To build this target, run docker buildx bake without any arguments:

$ docker buildx bake

Target properties

The properties you can set for a target closely resemble the CLI flags for docker build, with a few additional properties that are specific to Bake.

The dockerfile property specifies the path to the Dockerfile for a target. If you also set a context, the dockerfile path resolves relative to that context.

docker-bake.hcl

target "default" {
  context = "app"
  # resolves to app/src/www/Dockerfile
  dockerfile = "src/www/Dockerfile"
}

For all the properties you can set for a target, see the Bake reference.

Grouping targets

You can group targets together using the group block. This is useful when you want to build multiple targets at once.

docker-bake.hcl

group "all" {
  targets = ["webapp", "api", "tests"]
}

target "webapp" {
  dockerfile = "webapp.Dockerfile"
  tags = ["docker.io/username/webapp:latest"]
  context = "https://github.com/username/webapp"
}

target "api" {
  dockerfile = "api.Dockerfile"
  tags = ["docker.io/username/api:latest"]
  context = "https://github.com/username/api"
}

target "tests" {
  dockerfile = "tests.Dockerfile"
  contexts = {
    webapp = "target:webapp"
    api = "target:api"
  }
  output = ["type=local,dest=build/tests"]
  context = "."
}

To build all the targets in a group, pass the name of the group to the bake command.

$ docker buildx bake all

Pattern matching for targets and groups

Bake supports shell-style wildcard patterns when specifying target or grouped targets. This makes it easier to build multiple targets without listing each one explicitly.

Supported patterns:

• * matches any sequence of characters
• ? matches any single character
• [abc] matches any character in brackets

Note

Always wrap wildcard patterns in quotes. Without quotes, your shell will expand the wildcard to match files in the current directory, causing errors.

Examples:

# Match all targets starting with 'foo-'
$ docker buildx bake "foo-*"

# Match all targets
$ docker buildx bake "*"

# Matches: foo-baz, foo-caz, foo-daz, etc.
$ docker buildx bake "foo-?az"

# Matches: foo-bar, boo-bar
$ docker buildx bake "[fb]oo-bar"

# Matches: mtx-a-b-d, mtx-a-b-e, mtx-a-b-f
$ docker buildx bake "mtx-a-b-*"

You can also combine multiple patterns:

$ docker buildx bake "foo*" "tests"

Additional resources

Refer to the following pages to learn more about Bake's features:

• Learn how to use variables in Bake to make your build configuration more flexible.
• Learn how you can use matrices to build multiple images with different configurations in Matrices.
• Head to the Bake file reference to learn about all the properties you can set in a Bake file, and its syntax.