Multiple FROMs – what it means

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As of May 2017, multiple FROMs can be used in a single Dockerfile.
See “Builder pattern vs. Multi-stage builds in Docker” (by Alex Ellis) and PR 31257 by Tõnis Tiigi.

The general syntax involves adding FROM additional times within your Dockerfile – whichever is the last FROM statement is the final base image. To copy artifacts and outputs from intermediate images use COPY --from=<base_image_number>.

FROM golang:1.7.3 as builder
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/
RUN go get -d -v golang.org/x/net/html  
COPY app.go    .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o app .

FROM alpine:latest  
RUN apk --no-cache add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /root/
COPY --from=builder /go/src/github.com/alexellis/href-counter/app    .
CMD ["./app"]

The result would be two images, one for building, one with just the resulting app (much, much smaller)

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE

multi               latest              bcbbf69a9b59        6 minutes ago       10.3MB  
golang              1.7.3               ef15416724f6        4 months ago        672MB

what is a base image?

A set of files, plus EXPOSE‘d ports, ENTRYPOINT and CMD.
You can add files and build a new image based on that base image, with a new Dockerfile starting with a FROM directive: the image mentioned after FROM is “the base image” for your new image.

does it mean that if I declare neo4j/neo4j in a FROM directive, that when my image is run the neo database will automatically run and be available within the container on port 7474?

Only if you don’t overwrite CMD and ENTRYPOINT.
But the image in itself is enough: you would use a FROM neo4j/neo4j if you had to add files related to neo4j for your particular usage of neo4j.

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