What is the difference between Jib and Jib-Core?

Question

I was recently looking into Jib for my personal Java project I have been working on, but I just discovered something called Jib-Core. I went thru some of the documentation but I can't seem to figure out what the difference between them is, and when you would use one over the other. Is anybody well versed in the two of them?

Answer 1

Jib core is the underlying library that jib tooling is built upon. It is shared by jib-maven-plugin, jib-gradle-plugin, jib-cli and other third party integrations (like quarkus, sbt-jib, etc).

Jib (it seems like you're using maven) is actually the jib-maven-plugin, that is basically all the necessary code for jib-core to be used by maven to build your container. Like exposing configuration in your pom.xml and creating various goals for you to run.

We initially built jib-core to share code for all our products and also for tooling developers. We've had users use it directly to highly customize how they build container, but in general I don't see too many people using it like this.