The problem with all those Docker plugins is that they assume a stable Docker API. In the past Docker has several times broken backwards compatibility of its API making all Groovy/Maven plugins useless. The most sane and future proof way to use Docker, is to just delegate your commands to the actual docker executable (at least until Docker stabilizes the API) If you use any CI system (like Travis shown on the post) it is much easier to run direct docker commands (for building and pushing images) rather than handling Docker from the build system itself (in this case Gradle) ― kkapelon

I personally tried to use a couple of Docker plugins initially, but found that one is dead and another one is too difficult to set up.

Eventually I abandoned both of them and started to use Gradle only:

task buildAndPushDockerImage ( dependsOn: build ) { def dockerStageDir = new File ( project . buildDir , "docker" ) def repoName = 'organisationName/repositoryName' def tagName = buildNumber () def jarName = "${project.name}-${version}.jar" doLast { copy { from jar into dockerStageDir } def buildFile = new File ( dockerStageDir , "Dockerfile" ) buildFile . text = """\ FROM openjdk:8-jre-slim ADD ${jarName} ${jarName} RUN sh -c 'touch /${jarName}' VOLUME ["/tmp"] ENTRYPOINT ["sh", "-c", "exec java -jar \$JAVA_OPTS -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom /${jarName}"] EXPOSE 8080 EXPOSE 8081 """ exec { workingDir = dockerStageDir commandLine 'docker' , 'build' , '--pull' , '-t' , "${repoName}:${tagName}" , '.' } exec { workingDir = dockerStageDir commandLine 'docker' , 'push' , "${repoName}:${tagName}" } } }

There are a couple of important points here:

Use sh -c exec in order to avoid creation of separate java process inside docker.

in order to avoid creation of separate java process inside docker. The -Djava.security.egd part is explained here

The buildNumber() is a function which generates version number. I just use Travis’ build number as a version:

ext . buildNumber = { def buildNumber = System . getenv ( 'TRAVIS_BUILD_NUMBER' ) if ( buildNumber == null || buildNumber . allWhitespace ) { buildNumber = '1.0.0-SNAPSHOT' } return buildNumber } project . version = buildNumber ()

At the end - creating docker image without any plugins is not more complicated than using any of them.

Disclaimer - I’m not a gradle guru, so probably it can be re-written in even more compact form.