Using libvips with Go in Docker: A Quick Setup Guide

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Recently, I needed to build an image processing service that could handle both image compression and WebP conversion at scale. After evaluating several options, I chose bimg, which provides Go bindings for libvips - one of the fastest image processing libraries available.

However, getting libvips to work correctly in a Docker container turned out to be quite challenging. After spending considerable time debugging various build issues and runtime errors, I finally arrived at a reliable setup. I'm sharing this Dockerfile hoping it might save others some time.

# Build stage
FROM golang:1.20-alpine as build

WORKDIR /go/src/app

# Install build dependencies
RUN apk update && apk add --no-cache \
    git \
    build-base \
    pkgconfig \
    vips-dev

# Copy and download dependencies
COPY go.mod go.sum ./
RUN go mod download

COPY . .

# Build with CGO enabled but without static linking
ENV CGO_ENABLED=1
ENV GOOS=linux
ENV GOARCH=amd64
RUN go build -v -a -tags vips \
    --ldflags="-s -w -linkmode external" \
    -o app ./cmd/main.go

# Use at least version 3.20 of Alpine
FROM alpine:3.20

# Add edge repositories for latest libvips
RUN echo "https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.20/community" >> /etc/apk/repositories && \
    echo "https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.20/main" >> /etc/apk/repositories

# Install runtime dependencies
RUN apk update && apk add --no-cache \
    glib \
    glib-dev \
    util-linux

# Install image format dependencies
RUN apk add --no-cache \
    libwebp \
    libpng \
    libjpeg-turbo \
    libgomp \
    tiff \
    orc \
    lcms2 \
    libexif \
    giflib

# Install vips packages
RUN apk add --no-cache \
    vips \
    vips-dev \
    vips-tools

COPY --from=build /go/src/app/app /app

EXPOSE 8080

CMD ["/app"]

Key Points

• Multi-stage Build: Keeps the final image small and clean

• Dynamic Linking: Avoids common static linking issues with libvips

• Dependencies: Includes all common image format support