[Bug]: Service deploy fails, TaskDefinition Container.image is null when using image.build

[mrloldev]

Description

Deploying a new Load Balanced Web Service with Copilot v1.34 fails during CloudFormation with:

Invalid request provided: Create TaskDefinition: Container.image repository should not be null or empty.

Copilot appears to generate a task definition with an empty image field. Building and pushing the image by hand and specifying image.location in the manifest works, so the error seems to come from Copilot’s build/push logic.

Setup

• Copilot CLI version: v1.34.1
• OS: macOS on Apple silicon
• Docker engine: OrbStack
• Region: us‑east‑1
• Service type: Load Balanced Web Service
• The manifest uses an image.build section with a Dockerfile and build arg for a private Python package index.

Observed result

Running copilot svc deploy --name <service> --env staging results in a rollback. ECS task definition creation fails with the error above. When I inspect the CloudFormation template produced by copilot svc package, the ContainerImage parameter is set to just a digest (@sha256:…) instead of the full ECR URI.

Expected result

Copilot should build the Docker image, push it to ECR, and create a task definition with the full image URI.

Steps taken

• Verified I’m on the latest Copilot version.
• Deleted the service and environment stacks with copilot svc delete.
• Deleted the ECR repository for the service.
• Deleted the associated SSM parameter under /copilot/applications/<app>/components/<service>.
• Re‑ran copilot svc init with the same service name and Dockerfile.
• Copilot recreated the manifest but did not recreate the ECR repository.
• Recreated the repository myself with aws ecr create-repository and tried deploying again; the same null or empty error persists.

It feels like a regression of the old v1.28/v1.29 upgrade/downgrade bug, but this application was created and deployed with v1.33+.

[mzw4]

Same issue here! There doesn't seem to be any way for us to deploy a new job. Ours is a Scheduled Job.

copilot deploy results in "The repository with name '[name]' does not exist"
and after creating the ECS repository manually, we run into the same error during deployment:

Invalid request provided: Create TaskDefinition: Container.image repository should not be null or empty.

[mzw4]

For anyone else facing this issue, here is a hacky workaround that worked for us:

• Create the ECR repo manually
• Run copilot deploy -> It fails, but the image gets created successfully
• Take the image ARN and in manifest.yml, point it to the image directly instead of having it build the docker image:

image:
  # build: Docker
  location: <image arn>:latest

• Run copilot deploy and it deploys the task properly