I recently got the opportunity to talk with the amazing Josh Long on his podcast, Bootiful Podcast. It was a great time and a fun conversation. We started from the beginning and talked about all things containers, Docker, Buildpacks, Paketo, and of course, Spring & Native Images.

If you’re new to buildpacks or looking to give them a test run, this is a great place to start. We covered a lot of the concepts and questions people frequently ask. It was also great to talk about some of the improvements that we’ve recently added into the Java buildpacks. For example, we recently added support for UPX compression of native images and the ability to use Tilt with buildpacks for microservice development.

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I have over the years done a lot of work with buildpacks. Both on Cloud Foundry and now with Cloud Native Buildpacks. This year I’ve been fortunate enough to start a job at VMware working on them full time, which I’m pretty excited about.

I am primarily working to develop the Java-related Paketo buildpacks, as well as contribute to the Buildpacks project & to also maintain the Java Cloud Foundry buildpack.

To support this effort, I’m going to try and start writing more about these efforts. What’s new, what’s cool and more about how to use buildpacks.

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It’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update on the PHP Cloud Native Buildpacks. The good news is that lots of progress has been made. We’ve basically achieved feature parity with the old PHP buildpack and I believe the PHP CNB’s should be working for most apps now!

If you’re coming from the old PHP buildpack, there are some differences. This is basically a major version bump, so it was an opportunity to make a few breaking changes that we believe will generally improve the user experience. Check out the migration documentation for details on what’s changed.

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In my previous post, I talked about how to use the PHP Cloud Native buildpacks. It was not super tricky but required some manual work to set up. This is because the PHP CNBs were not, at the time, part of an official builder.

What’s a builder? It’s basically an image containing a bunch of CNBs, all ready for your use. See this link for more details.

If you are to run pack suggest-builders, then you will see the list of official builders. At the time of writing, that is Heroku, Cloud Foundry (bionic) and Cloud Foundry (cflinuxfs3).

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At work, I’ve been helping to rewrite the PHP buildpack as a set of Cloud Native Buildpacks. The PHP CNBs are coming together, current quality is alpha, but I think they’re ready enough for people to try them out and report how they work for you. This post has instructions and a demo to use the PHP CNBs.

But first, a slight digression.

A little about the architecture of the PHP CNBs. The previous PHP buildpack has been decomposed into a set of five PHP CNBs, two of which are optional. There are php-cnb, php-composer-cnb, httpd-cnb, nginx-cnb and php-web-cnb.

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In the past, I’ve worked with buildpacks through my time using Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry has first class support for buildpacks, which allows you to push code and let the buildpack handle the messy parts of actually running your code. Things like installing a language runtime, installing servers, etc…

Recently the buildpacks world has expanded with the CNCF’s acceptance of the Cloud Native Buildpacks project into the CNCF sandbox (sometimes called v3 buildpacks). In addition to an excellent and easily readable spec, this work brings us the pack CLI tool, which allows you to run Cloud Native Buildpacks on your local PC and easily deploy the output, which is an OCI image, to Docker or anywhere else you can run an OCI image.

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