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.

Usage

Before using the aws-cli Chainguard Image, 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 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.

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard Containers are minimal container images that are secure by default.

In many cases, the Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Containers are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro 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 -dev variant.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to leverage the -dev variants, copying application artifacts into a final minimal container that offers a reduced attack surface that won’t allow package installations or logins.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Containers, please visit Chainguard Academy and Chainguard Courses.

In addition to Containers, Chainguard offers VMs and Libraries. Contact Chainguard to access additional products.

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.