Which Dockerfile instructions are inherited in deriving images?

Everything is inherited. For example, if you have

# Dockerfile.B
FROM A

And then you

docker build -t B -f Dockerfile.B .

Then these two commands are all but identical

docker run ... A ...
docker run ... B ...

Similarly, it doesn’t matter if you put a given command at the end for a base Dockerfile.A, or if you start a Dockerfile.B FROM A and then have the same command.

(I think the one exception here is that specifying ENTRYPOINT in a new Dockerfile resets the CMD to an empty array. I don’t think this happens if you put CMD before ENTRYPOINT in the same Dockerfile.)

(Relatedly, you cannot undo a VOLUME declaration in a derived image, which in turn means you can’t create a MySQL or PostgreSQL image with prepopulated data. I think you also can’t undo EXPOSE though that’s less of a concern, since that directive has so little effect.)

These instruction are inherited from the base image along with system files.

EXPOSE

If the base image mentioned these EXPOSE 8080 9090 ports in Dockerfile, then the extend Dockerfile do not to need to expose these port. But there is a difference between exposing and publish.

ENV

If the base image has some ENV like test-a=abc then extended image will have these ENVs.

WorkingDir

If the base image have set "WorkingDir": "/root", then extended iamge will have working direcotry /root

MAINTAINER

MAINTAINER adiii extended image will have the same author if not overide.

Labels

The extended image will have the same label as the base image

onbuild

Designed to run by extended image.

ENTRYPOINT

Same entrypoint as in the base image, unless you overwrite it.

CMD

The extended image has the same CMD as the base image, as long as you do not overwrite the entrypoint instruction, see below.

You can try it.

Dockerfile A

FROM node:8.16
MAINTAINER adiii
LABEL key=test
EXPOSE 8080 9090
ENV test-a=abc
WORKDIR /root
ENTRYPOINT /root
CMD ["npm", "run", "start"]

Now build docker image B

Dockerfile B

FROM a

docker build -t b . Inspect the image b docker inspect b:latest you will see the above instruction iherited from the base image, because Dockerfile B did not overwrite the entrypoint instruction.

If the extended image overwrites the entrypoint, the documentation says CMD will reset to an empty value and must be redefined if wanted.

All Docker instructions are inherited as well, but keep in mind that EXPOSE doesn't actually publish a port since it will be your final running process (defined in the CMD or ENTRYPOINT) that will be responsible to do that.

Keep in mind that some instructions can be overridden, and taking your two Dockerfiles as a base, if on Dockerfile.b you define a new entrypoint (e.g. ["another-script.sh"]), this will be the effective one once you run the container.