Building a Spring Native application on my Docker Image

I am building my spring boot native application on an alpine (openjdk:13-alpine) docker image.

./mvnw spring-boot:build-image -DskipTests

When doing this I got an error :

[INFO] Building image 'docker.io/library/bff-distributor:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT'
[INFO] 
[INFO] I/O exception (java.io.IOException) caught when processing request to {}->docker://localhost:2376: com.sun.jna.LastErrorException: [2] No such file or directory
[INFO] Retrying request to {}->docker://localhost:2376
[INFO] I/O exception (java.io.IOException) caught when processing request to {}->docker://localhost:2376: com.sun.jna.LastErrorException: [2] No such file or directory
[INFO] Retrying request to {}->docker://localhost:2376
[INFO] I/O exception (java.io.IOException) caught when processing request to {}->docker://localhost:2376: com.sun.jna.LastErrorException: [2] No such file or directory
[INFO] Retrying request to {}->docker://localhost:2376
[INFO]  > Pulling builder image 'docker.io/paketobuildpacks/builder:tiny' 100%
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time:  01:54 min
[INFO] Finished at: 2021-04-16T15:26:34Z
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-maven-plugin:2.4.4:build-image (default-cli) on project bff-distributor: Execution default-cli of goal org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-maven-plugin:2.4.4:build-image failed: Connection to the Docker daemon at 'localhost' failed with error "[2] No such file or directory"; ensure the Docker daemon is running and accessible: com.sun.jna.LastErrorException: [2] No such file or directory -> [Help 1]

My gitlab.ci configuration

build:
  image: openjdk:13-alpine
  stage: build
  script:
    - chmod 755 ./mvnw
    - ./mvnw spring-boot:build-image -DskipTests

For information : I need it to be running on a docker image as the building it's part of my gitlab ci/cd stage.

Solution

As the link provided Scott says, you should use Docker in Docker to do what you want.

So, replace the openjdk image by the docker image (https://hub.docker.com/_/docker) and activate the dind service. As you need Java for the Maven execution, you can simply install jdk in the "before_script" section.

Here is my gitlab-ci script for the same kind of project :

  variables:
    DOCKER_HOST: tcp://docker:2375
    DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR: ""
  image: docker:20.10.8-dind-alpine3.13
  services:
    - docker:20.10.8-dind
  stage: build_push
  before_script:
    - apk add --update openjdk11
  script:
    - chmod 755 ./mvnw
    - ./mvnw spring-boot:build-image