Unknown instruction: ARG

Build Environment
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1

Hi,
I’ve got a build that builds out a docker image. This build worked last time I ran it (18 days ago), but is now failing with:

unknown instruction: ARG

Is this a Docker instruction that isn’t supported on Circle CI with whatever docker version is running in the build environment? Perhaps it was a change to nodejs’s Dockerfile/docker image that introduced this…not sure yet. Any ideas?

Here is the failing build step:

docker build -q -t foo/bar .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 2.785 MB
Sending build context to Docker daemon 6.674 MB


Step 0 : FROM node:4-onbuild
4-onbuild: Pulling from library/node

9a187a25eaf1: Digest: sha256:5eca29dc9fbaf927034d045407e52e337725ba902f93e0aafd8e87f76718a787
Status: Downloaded newer image for node:4-onbuild
# Executing 5 build triggers
Trigger 0, ARG NODE_ENV
Step 0 : ARG 
Unknown instruction: ARG

docker build -q -t foo/bar . returned exit code 1

Action failed: docker build -q -t foo/bar .
``docker build -q -t foo/bar .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 2.785 MB
Sending build context to Docker daemon 6.674 MB

Step 0 : FROM node:4-onbuild
4-onbuild: Pulling from library/node

9a187a25eaf1: Digest: sha256:5eca29dc9fbaf927034d045407e52e337725ba902f93e0aafd8e87f76718a787
Status: Downloaded newer image for node:4-onbuild
# Executing 5 build triggers
Trigger 0, ARG NODE_ENV
Step 0 : ARG 
Unknown instruction: ARG

docker build -q -t foo/bar . returned exit code 1

Action failed: docker build -q -t foo/bar .
2

So it does look like the nodejs team added ARG to their Dockerfiles recently per this commit.

Is ARG not supported on CircleCI? Any workarounds? If not I suppose I’ll have to customize the nodejs onbuild Dockerfile which would suck to have to maintain. Thanks for any suggestions.

3

By default, Circle CI currently uses Docker 1.8 which doesn’t support the ARG Dockerfile command. I was able to use Docker 1.10 though with this info and my build is running fine now:

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