Exclude static files from Flask container image

[esheehan-gsl]

Problem

When we deploy our containers, we host all of our static assets (JS and CSS) from the nginx container that has a reverse proxy to the Flask container. But when we build the container for the Flask app, we still copy the static files from the source code into the container.

Solution

If we’re using BuildKit, we can have separate ignore files for each of the Dockerfiles we have.

We will probably want to rename our docker files accordingly:

• services/api/Dockerfile ➡️ services/api/app.Dockerfile with services/api/app.Dockerfile.dockerignore
• services/api/Dockerfile-webserver ➡️ services/api/webserver.Dockerfile with services/api/webserver.Dockerfile.ignore

It may be worth considering moving all of our Docker config into a separate directory in the project root instead of living alongside each service…