Option to disable adding new tags to existing images

[karl-dpg]

Is there a way how to disable adding new tags to existing images?

We have a monorepo with multiple microservices, and for every build, we create a new tag. We would like to tag only those services that generate new images. Other services that have no changes (hence, their images have the same digest) do not need to get new tags.

[loosebazooka]

Could you help clarify what you mean by new tags? Presumably if your tag is not dynamically generated this shouldn't be happening?

[karl-dpg]

Yes, the tags are dynamically generated and their value changes for every build.

This is a typical build we have: some microservices have changes and others no. A new tag is generated, and each service is built. As it is, Jib will:

1. push images that are new with they newly created tag, and,
2. add a tag to the existing images for the services that have no changes in them.

We would like to disable (2), ie, not add tags to existing images.

[loosebazooka]

So a couple of things here.

• Is this maven or gradle?
• Can you know already at build time which services need to be updated? -- and just skip jib yourself? Presumably this is much harder in a CI.
• You may already be aware: but tags on a registry are just pointers to digests. So a new tag doesn't really do anything except add noise to the entries. Could be annoying if something in your container orchestration is watching for new tags though.

I think there might be some scope for adding this feature as a flag/config option, but I'm not sure yet.

[karl-dpg]

• Gradle
• Not at this time.
• This is exactly the issue. We have some orchestrator watching the registry, and it is unnecessarily deploying the services that have no changes.

[loosebazooka]

Thanks @karlmuscat-dpg this is useful information. If you're interested in submitting a design/proposal for this that we can work on together that could speed up the process -- https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/jib/tree/master/proposals

I would start off with something less formal, like a range of ideas and we can narrow down what might work in the comments.

If that is not an option for you, someone on the jib dev team can take a look at some point in the (hopefully near) future.

[karl-dpg]

Sure. I'll give it a shot.

[karl-dpg]

@loosebazooka PR 2382 👍

[karlmuscat]

@loosebazooka @chanseokoh Pushed PR #2531 to resolve this issue

[chanseokoh]

@karlmuscat @karlmuscat-dpg Jib Gradle 2.5.0 and Jib Maven 2.5.2 are released with the feature. Thanks for your contribution! Try it out, and let us know if it works.

[karlmuscat]

hey @chanseokoh! upgraded to 2.5.0, set the env var, and works like a charm 👍 thanks a lot