Summary

This article is a note about building docker image for amd64 from an Apple M1 macbook. The error is usually something similar to this

standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused "exec format error"

To fix that you need to specify --platform amd64 in your docker build

docker build --platform amd64 -t axcoto/website:$(GIT_COMMIT) .

The whole story

Today I got a new M1 laptop so that I can run Slack and Chrome at the same time. My macbook air is too slow so that I cannot use Slack at all.

I have a very simple dockerfile

FROM nginx:1.19

COPY public /usr/share/nginx/html

Once build and push to docker, then run on my k8s cluster, I got this

standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused "exec format error"

How can that happen, I just add my static file. No compilation. Turn out the image we built, without specifing anything is for arm64 cpu architecture. To fix that, we have to explicitly specify an cpu arch when cross building the image. Regardless, it’s alwys better to be specificed with what we want

docker build --platform amd64 -t axcoto/website:$(GIT_COMMIT) .

Then the image will be able to run on amd64 cpu.