How deeply does Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition cover Buildx?

Walks through contexts, builder nodes, and a distributed build, but stops short of multiple Dockerfiles and robust Windows support.

Buildx

As explained in Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition

Buildx is Docker's extended build client for building container images with advanced features including multi-platform builds.

Buildx extends Docker’s build commands with an optimized build engine while keeping Dockerfiles as input and images as output. It acts as a replacement for docker image build and supports distributed, multi-platform builds across Docker Engines. section 12.4

A practical Buildx workflow uses:

Docker contexts to describe connections to Docker Engines. section 12.4
Builder nodes, each assigned a target platform such as linux/amd64 or linux/arm64. section 12.4
A single build command that builds and pushes a multi-platform image. section 12.4

Create a small multi-platform build farm

Duplicate the current Docker context, create a builder with amd64 and arm64 nodes, then run docker buildx build with --platform linux/arm64,linux/amd64 and --push. Two contexts can point to one local engine for practice; real farms use networked engines secured with SSH or TLS. section 12.4

# build and push the hello app for all the builder's platforms:
docker buildx build --builder ch12-builder `
 --platform linux/arm64,linux/amd64 `
 -t "$dockerId/ch12-hello-x:2e" `
 --push ./hello

Inspect the complete build-and-push command for the example application. section 12.4

How Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition covers it

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Related concepts

multi-platform buildimplements · A multi-platform build is a build process that produces software artifacts for more than one operating-system or processor platform.
BuildKituses · BuildKit is a backend for efficient, extensible, and reproducible container image builds.
docker buildalternative to · docker build is a Docker command that constructs a container image from a Dockerfile and its build context.
multiarch container imageproduces · A multiarch container image is a container image reference providing runnable variants for multiple operating systems or processor architectures.
Dockerfileuses · A Dockerfile is a text file containing declarative instructions for building a container image and specifying its contents and runtime metadata.
manifest listproduces · A manifest list is a container-image metadata document that maps a common image reference to platform-specific image manifests.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.