Java Docker Pull Travails

Just had a problem that I thought I’d document the solution to for the world…

In our build pipeline at work, we use maven and the fabric8 docker-maven-plugin to manage our builds.  We love it, developers can just “mvn install” locally and then the Atlassian Bamboo build system just “mvn deploy”s in the exact same way.

Well, so we had some builds that suddenly weren’t able to pull the base images specified in our Dockerfiles down from Dockerhub, breaking the build with 500 error messages like:

[ERROR] DOCKER> Unable to pull 'library/debian:sid' from registry 'docker.io' : received unexpected HTTP status: 500 Server Error (Internal Server Error: 500) [received unexpected HTTP status: 500 Server Error (Internal Server Error: 500)]

But it worked fine on our local box. And it could pull our custom images from Artifactory fine. What’s the problem here?  Bamboo?  The plugin? Well, some helpful community folks helped home in on it, it turns out that for some versions of Java 1.8, 8u131 and prior at least going back to 112, where there’s some problem (TLS? Root certs? Not really sure) that messes up when pulling a docker.io container from inside Java during our docker build step.  My team’s microservices aren’t Java based so the Java version doesn’t come up much – but of course maven uses Java.

Upgrading the JDK version to 8u144 made the problem go away.  We actually have an up to date curated Java version we use in Bamboo for our Java builds, but folks doing Python builds were just using the default “JDK 1.8” that Atlassian is putting on their Bamboo build agent AMI, which is of course old and suffers from this issue.

 

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