How can you tell whether a Pivotal Cloud Foundry Buildpack is online vs offline

Products

• VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs

Issue/Introduction

In general, the offline buildpacks can work without Internet access while online requires an Internet access. When the users examine the output from cf buildpacks, they might wonder which buildpacks from Pivotal are online and which ones are offline?

$ cf buildpacks
Getting buildpacks...

buildpack                     position   enabled   locked   filename
staticfile_buildpack_delete   1          true      false    staticfile-buildpack-v1.4.23.zip
staticfile_buildpack          2          true      false    staticfile_buildpack-cached-v1.4.27.zip
java_buildpack_offline        3          true      false    java-buildpack-offline-v4.12.zip
ruby_buildpack                4          true      false    ruby_buildpack-cached-v1.7.18.zip
nodejs_buildpack              5          true      false    nodejs_buildpack-cached-v1.6.23.zip
go_buildpack                  6          true      false    go_buildpack-cached-v1.8.21.zip
python_buildpack              7          true      false    python_buildpack-cached-v1.6.15.zip
php_buildpack                 8          true      false    php_buildpack-cached-v4.3.54.zip
dotnet_core_buildpack         9          true      false    dotnet-core_buildpack-cached-v2.0.6.zip
binary_buildpack              10         true      false    binary_buildpack-cached-v1.0.18.zip

The Java buildpack from Pivotal contains _offline or _online in the buildpack name, which signifies if it is an offline or online buildpack. For the rest of the buildpacks, the name contains -cached for offline or nothing for online.

This only holds true for buildpacks installed by the platform. If a user adds a buildpack on his own, the user can name it whatever he wants and choose not to follow Pivotal’s convention.

By default, all of the buildpacks deployed by the Platform should be offline buildpacks.

Best Practices for Buildpacks

Moving forward, we recommend that customers should not rename system deployed buildpacks provided by Pivotal.

 

Environment

Additional Information

https://community.pivotal.io/s/article/Pivotal-Cloud-Foundry-Buildpack-Changes-for-Elastic-Runtime-Versions-18-and-Above