With new M1 / M2 MacBooks from Apple, the "new" arm64 architecture began to dominate the laptop market. In this short article, we describe how developers could help the open-source ecosystem to adopt their Docker images to the new platforms.
Developers with M1 / M2 MacBooks using Docker need support for the new arm64 architecture processors. For project maintainers, it means that instead of a single amd64 platform image, they must build several once for amd64 / arm64 platforms. It requires adopting their current CI tools to build multiple images and expose them within a single Docker manifest (under a specific tag name). This process is time-consuming and requires much effort, especially in open-source world.
With Robert Munteanu from Adobe, we adopted one of Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) projects, Apache Sling Starter, to the new multi-arch support procedure.
It required the following steps:
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Create an Apache JIRA issue asking for M1 Docker images support e.g. SLING-11714
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Agree with the ASF project owner to use GitHub Actions workflows that have the support for docker buildx:
I would suggest using GitHub Actions, there you can use the official suite of docker actions to build multiplatform images with little need for custom scripting [1].
source: https://lists.apache.org/thread/xd3p8nom68gkgjmjpgfylh0vyx260s5o
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Provide PRs with a working solution (in our case, we use Docker Maven Plugin to manage
buildxcontainer that builds and pushes images):- https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-starter/commit/1b879e7eec280e1bd20a4bc1e247f29604f26294
- https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-starter/commit/39e9cd35e5b4bb0c4a639fe42950555ca03f05c3
- https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-starter/commit/019999478ab600ab0aef111aac110f44f8a19bdb
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The Apache project owner needs to raise an issue to Apache Software Foundation infrastructure team to enable GH actions secrets for pushing docker hub images e.g INFRA-23983.
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Once all ready, PRs can be merged.
Summarizing, adding support for the arm64 platform in open-source projects is not a complex work. Satisfaction from being the ASF contributor is worth spending a few hours after your everyday routines.