Chainguard Image for busybox

Container image with only busybox and libc (available in both musl and glibc variants). Suitable for running any binaries that only have a dependency on glibc/musl.

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/busybox:latest

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

Upcoming Changes

On July 15, 2024 the busybox:latest image will move from a Alpine base to a Wolfi base, in-line with all other images in our registry. We do not expect this to cause breakages, but encourage all users to test and verify the new version.

You can test today by migrating to the cgr.dev/chainguard/busybox:latest-glibc image. From July 15, the :latest and :latest-glibc will point to the same image.

Full details are in this blog post.

Usage

Chainguard offers two different variations of the busybox Image. Both contain the BusyBox software but are built against different variants of libc:

• latest, meant for variants based on musl
• latest-glibc, meant for variants based on glibc

You can ensure that either of these Images are working correctly by testing that they can run commands and return output. The following commands will both return hello world! in your terminal:

musl:

docker run -it cgr.dev/chainguard/busybox:latest echo hello world!

glibc:

docker run -it cgr.dev/chainguard/busybox:latest-glibc echo hello world!

Also, note that you can open an interactive shell on either version of the Image with command like the following:

docker run -it cgr.dev/chainguard/busybox:latest sh

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.