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Genesis containerisation - building a container

The Genesis low-code platform provides two different options for building a Docker image.

  • The first option, which is covered in this section, is using the Gradle plugin. This is the easiest and quickest way to get up and running with a Docker image, but it comes with the cost of reduced flexibility. This option is highly recommended for new developers to try Genesis out.

  • The second option is to create your own Dockerfile and build your own image. This provides the most flexibility, but it means you need to manage the Genesis dependencies yourself.

Gradle plugin overview​

The Gradle plugin provides the easiest and quickest way to get Genesis running in a Docker container. We provide a Gradle task that generates a Dockerfile for you, with all the necessary dependencies, and then builds it.

There are 3 Gradle tasks that are provided to help you build your Docker image:

  • createDockerfile - generates the Dockerfile dynamically based on user-defined settings and dependencies. It also copies all the files needed for the context into the same folder.
  • buildImage - runs createDockerfile as a sub-task, and then runs docker build on the generated Dockerfile.
  • pushImage - pushes the generated image to a repository defined in gradle.properties (see Genesis containerisation - pushing the image to a registry).

Using the plugin​

  1. Create or use an existing Genesis project. See our Quick Start guide for details of creating a new project.

  2. Make the necessary changes to the genesis-system-definitions.kts for your dependencies, such as the location of the database. You can find more details in our page on preparing and building the server.

  3. Add your dependencies to the Deploy plugin build.gradle.kts (default location for the Blank App Seed is server/jvm/appname-deploy/build.gradle.kts):

    genesisServer(
        group = "global.genesis",
        name = "genesis-distribution",
        version = properties["genesisVersion"].toString(),
        classifier = "bin",
        ext = "zip"
    )
    genesisServer(
        group = "global.genesis",
        name = "auth-distribution",
        version = properties["authVersion"].toString(),
        classifier = "bin",
        ext = "zip"
    )
  1. Run the buildImage Gradle task from the root of the server/jvm/ project. You can also run this task from your IDE if you prefer:
./gradlew buildImage

Once the image has been built, the output should display the name of the image:

Successfully built eaa290495637
Successfully tagged genesis/appname:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT
Created image with ID 'eaa290495637'.