Using Remote Container Builder

The Remote Container Builder enables you to build container images using blazing-fast, remote build compute instances managed by Garden and to share build caches with your team.

Our free-tier includes a certain amount of build minutes and layer caching per month and you get more by switching to our team or enterprise tiers. You can learn more about the different tiers here.

If you run out of build minutes, Garden will simply fallback to local builds without any disruption.

Enabling Remote Container Builder

Step 1 — Log in to Garden Cloud

You need to be logged into Garden Cloud to use the remote container builder:

garden login

If this is your first time logging in, you'll be asked to sign up.

Step 2 — Configure the container provider

To enable the Remote Container Builder, add the following to your project level configuration under the provider field:

  - name: container
    gardenContainerBuilder:
      enabled: true

Afterwards your project config should look something like this:

kind: Project
name: my-project
environments:
  - name: dev
  - name: ci

providers:
  - name: container
    gardenContainerBuilder:
      enabled: true
  - name: kubernetes
    # ...

You can also enable the Remote Container Builder in specific environments like so:

kind: Project
name: my-project
environments:
  - name: local
  - name: remote-dev
  - name: ci

providers:
  - name: container
    environments: [remote-dev, ci] # <-- Specify the environment
    gardenContainerBuilder:
      enabled: true
  - name: kubernetes
    # ...

Step 3 — Give it a spin (optional)

If you a already have a Garden project with container Build actions, simply run:

garden build

...or any other command that triggers a build.

If you're using the kubernetes provider, the image will be pushed to the configured deploymentRegistry.

You can then check out the results in the new Builds UI.

Next steps

If you haven't already, check out our docs on building containers to learn how to add container Build actions to your project that can be built by the Remote Container Builder and used by other actions, e.g. to:

• Deploy K8s resources

• Install Helm charts

• Run tests