Auto-Discovery

The autodocker plugin scans your project and automatically registers components. Let’s see how it works.

How Auto-Discovery Works

When EMB loads your project, the autodocker plugin:

1. Scans all directories in your project root
2. Looks for directories containing a Dockerfile
3. Registers each as a component with default settings
4. Creates a docker/image resource for building the image

Viewing Discovered Components

Use the components command to see what EMB discovered:

emb components

 COMPONENT  NAME  ID  CREATED  STATUS
--------------------------------------
 api

EMB found our api component automatically.

Viewing the Full Configuration

To see exactly how EMB configured the component, use config print:

emb config print

components:
  api:
    rootDir: api
    resources:
      image:
        type: docker/image
        params: {}
defaults: {}
env: {}
flavors: {}
plugins:
  - name: autodocker
project:
  name: hello-world
tasks: {}
vars: {}

Notice how EMB added the components section with all the details for building the API image - you didn’t have to write any of this!

The Generated Resource

Each auto-discovered component gets a docker/image resource with these defaults:

resources:
  image:
    type: docker/image    # Resource type
    # params:             # Optional build parameters
    #   target: ...       # Dockerfile target stage
    #   args: ...         # Build arguments

The image will be tagged as {project-name}/{component-name}:latest, so our API image will be hello-world/api:latest.

Next Step

Continue to First Commands to learn the essential EMB commands.