Chainguard Image for awx

Chainguard image for AWX. Built on top of Ansible, AWX is an automation controller that provides a web based interface, REST API, and task engine.

Chainguard Images are regularly-updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.

Download this Image

This image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/awx:latest

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

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard's AWX image is meant to serve as a drop-in replacement for the official AWX image. There is, however, a warning that can come up when using our image as non-root:

/usr/bin/launch_awx_task.sh: line 4: /etc/passwd: Permission denied

This originates from a known open issue with AWX, although it does not affect the functionality of the image. Chainguard's image already configures the awx user with the permissions they later set dynamically. For further reference, take a look at the explanation from the upstream project here.The entrypoint script dynamically checks and adds the user to /etc/passwd only if the UID ≥ 500 and not already present. Although it's not generally recommended, you can run the Chainguard image as root to avoid this warning until the problem is fixed.

Prerequisites

In order to follow the example in this overview, you will need to have the following in place.

• A Kubernetes cluster.
• kubectl installed and configured to access the Kubernetes cluster.
• Helm: Installed and configured.
• An Ansible playbook If you are using outside of the AWX Operator environment

Getting Started

Before getting started with AWX, we'll need to deploy the operator. To deploy the AWX operator, follow the steps outlined by upstream here.

If you are unsure of how to deploy Chainguard's AWX Image, use this manifest as a reference, and modify for your use. Apply the manifest after the operator has been successfully deployed, and is in a ready state.

cat <<EOF | kubectl -n awx apply -f -
apiVersion: awx.ansible.com/v1beta1
kind: AWX
metadata:
  name: awx-demo
spec:
  image: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/awx
  image_version: latest
  image_pull_policy: Always
EOF

Documentation and Resources

You can learn more about AWX by following the official documentation. Additionally, you may ifnd the API reference to be of interest.

Contact Support

If you have a Zendesk account (typically set up for you by your Customer Success Manager) you can reach out to Chainguard's Customer Success team through our Zendesk portal.

What are Chainguard Images?

Chainguard Images are a collection of container images designed for security and minimalism.

Many Chainguard Images are distroless; they contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These images do not even contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Images are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Images include:

• Minimal design, with no unnecessary software bloat
• Automated nightly builds to ensure Images are completely up-to-date and contain all available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs (software bills of materials) attesting the provenance of all artifacts within the Image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

-dev Variants

As mentioned previously, Chainguard’s distroless Images have no shell or package manager by default. This is great for security, but sometimes you need these things, especially in builder images. For those cases, most (but not all) Chainguard Images come paired with a -dev variant which does include a shell and package manager.

Although the -dev image variants have similar security features as their distroless versions, such as complete SBOMs and signatures, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. The general recommendation is to use the -dev variants only to build the application and then copy all application artifacts into a distroless image, which will result in a final container image that has a minimal attack surface and won’t allow package installations or logins.

That being said, it’s worth noting that -dev variants of Chainguard Images are completely fine to run in production environments. After all, the -dev variants are still more secure than many popular container images based on fully-featured operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu since they carry less software, follow a more frequent patch cadence, and offer attestations for what they include.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Images, we encourage you to visit Chainguard Academy, our documentation and education platform.