Dockerfile if else condition with external arguments

It might not look that clean but you can have your Dockerfile (conditional) as follow:

FROM centos:7
ARG arg
RUN if [[ -z "$arg" ]] ; then echo Argument not provided ; else echo Argument is $arg ; fi

and then build the image as:

docker build -t my_docker . --build-arg arg=45

or

docker build -t my_docker .

There is an interesting alternative to the proposed solutions, that works with a single Dockerfile, require only a single call to docker build per conditional build and avoids bash.

Solution:

The following Dockerfile solves that problem. Copy-paste it and try it yourself.

ARG my_arg

FROM centos:7 AS base
RUN echo "do stuff with the centos image"

FROM base AS branch-version-1
RUN echo "this is the stage that sets VAR=TRUE"
ENV VAR=TRUE

FROM base AS branch-version-2
RUN echo "this is the stage that sets VAR=FALSE"
ENV VAR=FALSE

FROM branch-version-${my_arg} AS final
RUN echo "VAR is equal to ${VAR}"

Explanation of Dockerfile:

We first get a base image (centos:7 in your case) and put it into its own stage. The base stage should contain things that you want to do before the condition. After that, we have two more stages, representing the branches of our condition: branch-version-1 and branch-version-2. We build both of them. The final stage than chooses one of these stages, based on my_arg. Conditional Dockerfile. There you go.

Output when running:

(I abbreviated this a little...)

my_arg==2

docker build --build-arg my_arg=2 .
Step 1/12 : ARG my_arg
Step 2/12 : ARG ENV
Step 3/12 : FROM centos:7 AS base
Step 4/12 : RUN echo "do stuff with the centos image"
do stuff with the centos image
Step 5/12 : FROM base AS branch-version-1
Step 6/12 : RUN echo "this is the stage that sets VAR=TRUE"
this is the stage that sets VAR=TRUE
Step 7/12 : ENV VAR=TRUE
Step 8/12 : FROM base AS branch-version-2
Step 9/12 : RUN echo "this is the stage that sets VAR=FALSE"
this is the stage that sets VAR=FALSE
Step 10/12 : ENV VAR=FALSE
Step 11/12 : FROM branch-version-${my_arg}
Step 12/12 : RUN echo "VAR is equal to ${VAR}"
VAR is equal to FALSE

my_arg==1

docker build --build-arg my_arg=1 .
...
Step 11/12 : FROM branch-version-${my_arg}
Step 12/12 : RUN echo "VAR is equal to ${VAR}"
VAR is equal to TRUE

Thanks to Tõnis for this amazing idea!