On further inspection, this seems to be overwritten when building the rootfs, here: https://github.com/unikraft/kraftkit/blob/staging/internal/cli/kraft/run/utils.go#L410
I am not sure what the interaction should be between:

• Dockerfile's CMD
• Kraftfile's cmd

In my case, I have a Dockerfile with no CMD:

FROM golang:1.21.3-bookworm AS build

WORKDIR /src

COPY ./server.go /src/server.go

RUN set -xe; \
    CGO_ENABLED=1 \
    go build \
      -buildmode=pie \
      -ldflags "-linkmode external -extldflags '-static-pie'" \
      -tags netgo \
      -o /server server.go \
    ;

FROM scratch

COPY --from=build /server /server
COPY --from=build /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
COPY --from=build /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /lib64/

Hi @LucaSeri, this is a recent addition, towards having better compatibility with Dockerfiles. The priority of arguments should be:

CLI > Kraftfile > Dockerfile

1. If the user has supplied -a|--args flag, this takes the highest priority and everything else is ignored.
2. If the user has not supplied the -a|--args flag, and the Kraftfile has a cmd entry, use this.
3. If neither the -a|--args flag is supplied nor the Kraftfile has a cmd element, try to use the Dockerfile's CMD.

Thanks @nderjung. That all makes sense. Maybe this should be revisited since it seems the -a flag cannot directly replace the cmd field. The parser gives the following error:
expected param to be in the format 'libname.param=value' but got: '/server'

I've also looked a bit into this, because I had the same issues when running many applications from the catalog with kraft, including helloworld-c.

Looking at the codebase, it seems that the -a|--args flag is used for setting kernel arguments, while the cmd element in both Kraftfile and Dockerfile is used for application arguments.

I got a fix in #1622, but I'm not aware how to provide application arguments directly from the CLI (using kraft run).

does this still happen? 🤔