We are using skaffold for our kubernetes deployment and don't need the feature of building a docker container for every microservice, since we are building a base docker image from our microservice monorepo.

Right now, we have a dockerfile for each service which looks like this:

FROM microservice-base-image:latest
WORKDIR <service>
CMD ["node", "."]

This brings the problem, that for every change in our base image skaffold builds and pushes n times docker images, which are the size of the base image.

Is there any way to tell skaffold to just use our base docker image without building a separate one for each microservice, so that we can adjust our base image in a way to start the specific index file via an ENTRYPOINT?

We already tried the following, but skaffold complains about that the image can not be pulled, even though we are logged in into the private docker registry.

skaffold.yaml

  apiVersion: skaffold/v2alpha3
  kind: Config
  
  profiles:
    - name: localhost
      deploy:
        kubectl:
          manifests:
            - ./infra/k8s/tmp/*
    - name: staging
      deploy:
        kubectl:
          manifests:
            - ./infra/k8s/tmp/*
  
  deploy:
    kubectl:
      manifests:
        - ./infra/k8s/tmp/*

service-1-deployment.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: $CI_ENVIRONMENT_PREFIX-service-1-depl
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: $CI_ENVIRONMENT_PREFIX-service-1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: $CI_ENVIRONMENT_PREFIX-service-1
    spec:
      imagePullSecrets:
        - name: <our-private-registry-secret>
      containers:
        - name: $CI_ENVIRONMENT_PREFIX-service-1
          image: <accountid>.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/microservice-base-image:latest

Skaffold log of both skaffold dev and skaffold run --default-repo <accountid>.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com -p $CI_ENVIRONMENT_PREFIX

Waiting for deployments to stabilize...
 - deployment/staging-service-1-depl: container staging-service-1 is waiting to start: <accountid>.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/microservice-base-image:latest can't be pulled
    - pod/staging-service-1-6bf9b46c68-jpmnt: container staging-service-1 is waiting to start: <accountid>.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/microservice-base-image:latest can't be pulled
 - deployment/staging-service-1-depl failed. Error: container staging-service-1 is waiting to start: <accountid>.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/microservice-base-image:latest can't be pulled.
Cleaning up...