Frequently Asked Questions

How many builds can a project run concurrently?

You can run as many builds concurrently as you want against a single Depot project.

How do I use Depot with docker-compose?

You can use depot bake -f docker-compose.yml to build all of the images in your Compose file and then use docker-compose up to run the resulting images.

How do you authenticate with Depot?

We have all our authentication options documented for depot in our CLI authentication documentation.

Can I build Docker images for M1 Macs?

Yes! Depot supports native Arm container builds out of the box. We detect the architecture of the machine requesting a build via depot build. If that architecture is Arm, we route the build to a builder running Arm natively. You can build Docker images for M1 Macs and run the resulting image immediately, as it is made specifically for your architecture. See our documentation on Arm containers for more details.

Can I build multi-platform Docker images?

Yes! Check out our integration guide on how we do it.

Can I use Depot with my existing docker build or docker buildx build commands?

Yes! We have a depot configure-docker command that configures Depot as a plugin for the Docker CLI and sets Depot as the default builder for both docker build and docker buildx build. See our docker build guide for more details.

What are these extra files in my registry?

Registries like Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and Google Container Registry (GCR) don't accurately display provenance information for a given image. Provenance is a set of metadata that describes how an image was built. This metadata is stored in the registry alongside the image. It's enabled by default in docker build and thus by default in depot build as well.

If you would like to clean up the clutter, you can run your build with --provenance=false:

depot build -t <your-registry> --push --provenance=false .

Does Depot support building images in any lazy-pulling compatible format? e.g. estargz, nydus or others?

Depot supports building images in any lazy-pulling compatible format. You can build an estargz image by setting the --output flag at build time:

depot build \
    --output "type=image,name=repo/image:tag,push=true,compression=estargz,oci-mediatypes=true force-compression=true" \
    .

Does Depot supporting building images with ztsd compression?

Depot supports building images with zstd compression, a popular compression format to help speed up the launching of containers in AWS Fargate and Kubernetes. You can build an image with zstd compression by setting the --output flag at build time:

depot build \
    --output type=image,name=$IMAGE_URI:$IMAGE_TAG,oci-mediatypes=true,compression=zstd,compression-level=3 force-compression=true,push=true \
    .