index.md

Buildx drivers overview

The buildx client connects out to the BuildKit backend to execute builds - Buildx drivers allow fine-grained control over management of the backend, and supports several different options for where and how BuildKit should run.

Currently, we support the following drivers:

• The docker driver, that uses the BuildKit library bundled into the Docker daemon. (guide, reference)
• The docker-container driver, that launches a dedicated BuildKit container using Docker, for access to advanced features. (guide, reference)
• The kubernetes driver, that launches dedicated BuildKit pods in a remote Kubernetes cluster, for scalable builds. (guide, reference)
• The remote driver, that allows directly connecting to a manually managed BuildKit daemon, for more custom setups. (guide)

To create a new builder that uses one of the above drivers, you can use the docker buildx create command:

$ docker buildx create --name=<builder-name> --driver=<driver> --driver-opt=<driver-options>

The build experience is very similar across drivers, however, there are some features that are not evenly supported across the board, notably, the docker driver does not include support for certain output/caching types.

Feature	docker	docker-container	kubernetes	remote
Automatic --load	✅	❌	❌	❌
Cache export	❔ (inline only)	✅	✅	✅
Docker/OCI tarball output	❌	✅	✅	✅
Multi-arch images	❌	✅	✅	✅
BuildKit configuration	❌	✅	✅	❔ (managed externally)