Chainguard Container for aws-cli

Minimal aws-cli container image.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/aws-cli:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Chainguard aws-cli container image is comparable to the upstream Amazon AWS CLI image, with improved security and few-to-zero CVEs.

Getting Started

Before using the aws-cli Chainguard Container, you need to configure your AWS credentials. There are a number of ways you can do this, so we encourage you to review the official AWS credentials documentation to determine what method works best for you.

AWS credentials and configurations are typically stored in a directory named .aws. Assuming you've already set up your AWS credentials locally, you can share them from your host machine to a container by mounting this directory as a volume. The following command follows this method to pass along AWS credentials in order to retrieve a list of EKS clusters:

docker run --rm -it -v ~/.aws:/home/nonroot/.aws:ro cgr.dev/chainguard/aws-cli:latest s3 ls

Note that Chainguard's aws-cli container image has a single user nonroot with uid 65532, belonging to gid 65532.; the previous command mounts the local .aws directory under this user's home directory. Be aware that if you follow this method you may need to adjust the permissions of your local credentials file in order for the container to be able to read it.

You can get help with any command when using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) by following any command name with help. For example, the following command displays help for the general AWS CLI options and the available top-level commands:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/chainguard/aws-cli:latest help

The following command displays help information for the aws ec2 run-instances command:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/chainguard/aws-cli:latest ec2 run-instances help

Please refer to the official Getting Started guide for more information.

Documentation and Resources

• AWS CLI User Guide
• AWS CLI Configuration and Credential File Settings

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.