Towards Understanding Docker Build Faults in Practice: Symptoms, Root Causes, and Fix Patterns

Docker building is a critical component of containerization in modern software development, automating the process of packaging and converting sources into container images. It is not uncommon to find that Docker build faults (DBFs) occur frequently across Docker-based projects, inducing non-negligible costs in development activities. DBF resolution is a challenging problem and previous studies have demonstrated that developers spend non-trivial time in resolving encountered build faults. However, the characteristics of DBFs is still under-investigated, hindering practical solutions to build management in the Docker community. In this paper, to bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive study for understanding the real-world DBFs in practice. We collect and analyze a DBF dataset of 255 issues and 219 posts from GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Docker Forum. We investigate and construct characteristic taxonomies for the DBFs, including 15 symptoms, 23 root causes, and 35 fix patterns. Moreover, we study the fault distributions of symptoms and root causes, in terms of the different build types, i.e., Dockerfile builds and Docker-compose builds. Based on the results, we provide actionable implications and develop a knowledge-based application, which can potentially facilitate research and assist developers in improving the Docker build management.