Ad space (banner)
AD

Got the fundamentals? A structured Docker course is a fast way to level up.

Find Docker courses on Udemy

Affiliate link. Costs you nothing extra.

🐳Docker Lessons
Lesson 37 / 45

What Is a Multi-Stage Build?

This lesson is for anyone whose final image is bloated with build tools it doesn't need at run time. A multi-stage build uses several FROM instructions and copies only the finished artifacts into the last stage.

You build in one stage — compilers, dev dependencies and all — then start a fresh, minimal stage and COPY --from just the output into it.

A Go or Node application built this way can shrink from hundreds of megabytes to a few tens, because the compiler and intermediate files never reach the final image.

A common stumble is thinking the earlier stages still take up space in the result. They don't — only the final stage becomes the image.

In real work, multi-stage builds are the standard technique for compiled languages and for front-end applications that need a build step.

Docker
Try it (type this into the pseudo terminal)
docker build -t myapp .

🧑‍💻 You can type this command into the Docker pseudo terminal to try it yourself (this page itself has no interactive terminal).

Ad space (banner)
Ad space (in-article)