How to Build Images Faster

Go compiler is one of the fastest modern programming languages. However, it still takes quite a few seconds, sometimes even minutes, to actually build and run code. This isn't ideal in the fast-paced tech world, where changes are pushed and built multiple times in a day. If we can somehow speed up the build process, it would not only save the developers a lot of time but also save resources required to generate these builds.

Let's see how we can optimize the build process.

Caching dependencies

The build process of our coffeeshop app involves downloading the dependencies, building the Go executable, and then building a Docker image from it. So, which of these steps takes the majority of the build time? That should be the one we target for our optimization.

Who is responsible for the build time?

Click the “Run” button to see the steps that get executed when a Docker image is built: