image-tags.md

Understand image tags vs digests and use the :latest tag with caution

One Paragraph Explainer

If this is a production situation and security and stability are important then just "convenience" is likely not the best deciding factor. In addition the :latest tag is Docker's default tag. This means that a developer who forgets to add an explicit tag will accidentally push a new version of an image as latest, which might end in very unintended results if the latest tag is being relied upon as the latest production image.

Code example:

$ docker build -t company/image_name:0.1 .
# :latest image is not updated
$ docker build -t company/image_name
# :latest image is updated
$ docker build -t company/image_name:0.2 .
# :latest image is not updated
$ docker build -t company/image_name:latest .
# :latest image is updated

What Other Bloggers Say

From the blog by Vladislav Supalov:

Some people expect that :latest always points to the most-recently-pushed version of an image. That’s not true.

From the Docker success center