Tagging Docker Images the Right Way

In our consultancy work, we often see companies tagging production images in an ad-hoc manner. Taking a look at their registry, we find a list of images like:

and so on.

There is nothing wrong with using semantic versioning for your software, but using it as the only strategy for tagging your images often results in a manual, error prone process (how do you teach your CI/CD pipeline when to upgrade your versions?)

I’m going to explain you an easy, yet robust, method for tagging your images. Spoiler alerts: use the commit hash as the image tag.

Suppose the HEAD of our Git repository has the hash ff613f07328fa6cb7b87ddf9bf575fa01b0d8e43. We can manually build an image with this hash like so:

Read more at Container Solutions