Building a Docker container can take quite a while. However, there are some easy parts to speed them up.
This is an article I had for quite a while as a draft. As part of my yearly cleanup, I've published it without finishing it. It might not be finished or have other problems.
Install Early, Copy Late
Make sure you install dependencies early and copy code late during building the container. This helps to cache the dependencies.
You might also want to look at dependency pinning.
.dockerignore
Make sure you don't re-build the container with stuff you don't need.
You can check the included files via
sudo docker build -t test .
sudo docker run --entrypoint /usr/bin/find -it test
sudo docker images | grep ^test
When I started looking at the size of my Flask image, it was 357MB.
Without copying any of the code, it was 349MB.