Your code is then built in an environment that matches the devices in your fleet. So if you’re pushing an app for BeagleBone Black devices, we’ll build your code in an ARMv7 environment. For Raspberry Pi 1, it's ARMv6. In fact, we provide native ARM builders for ARM images, just as we use x86 servers to build images for x86 devices.
For applications with multiple containers, a docker-compose.yml file will need to be included at the root of your project. This configuration file specifies the services that make up your application, as well as the system resources each service has access to. Applications with a single container will have a default docker-compose.yml file generated if none is included.
Most services will need to include a Dockerfile, which contains a list of commands for the builders. For each service, the builders will pull a base OS, install packages and dependencies, clone git repositories, and run any other steps you define for the setup and initialization of that service.
For Node.js services, you can use a package.json file without a Dockerfile. In this case, the builders create an implicit Dockerfile, which simulates the build process a Node.js/npm project expects. In this way, we are able to transparently run Node.js services on balena, while also taking advantage of some of Docker’s caching features. A Dockerfile will always give you more power to fine-tune, but you can start fast without and shift to a Dockerfile whenever you like.
