Shipwright: A Human-in-the-Loop System for Dockerfile Repair
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Docker is a tool for lightweight OS-level virtualization. Docker images are created by performing a build, controlled by a source-level artifact called a Dockerfile. We studied Dockerfiles on GitHub, and – to our great surprise – found that over a quarter of the examined Dockerfiles failed to build (and thus to produce images). To address this problem, we propose SHIPWRIGHT, a human-in-the-loop system for finding repairs to broken Dockerfiles. SHIPWRIGHT uses a modified version of the BERT language model to embed build logs and to cluster broken Dockerfiles. Using these clusters and a search-based procedure, we were able to design 13 rules for making automated repairs to Dockerfiles. With the aid of SHIPWRIGHT, we submitted 45 pull requests (with a 42.2 acceptance rate) to GitHub projects with broken Dockerfiles. Furthermore, in a "time-travel" analysis of broken Dockerfiles that were later fixed, we found that SHIPWRIGHT proposed repairs that were equivalent to human-authored patches in 22.77 state-of-the-art, static Dockerfile analyses, and found that, while static tools detected possible build-failure-inducing issues in 20.6–33.8 files we examined, SHIPWRIGHT was able to detect possible issues in 73.25 the files and, additionally, provide automated repairs for 18.9
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