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Sign UpMinimal image useful as a base for building secure images.
Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.
For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev
:
Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION
placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.
chainguard-base
is comparable to other common base images, like alpine
, debian
, or ubuntu
, with the following differences:
chainguard-base
features a stripped down, minimal designThe chainguard-base
image includes a shell and package manager, making it useful for installing an application’s OS-level dependencies. The image will start in a shell by default:
You can run commands from within the shell like this, or you can run commands directly on your local machine without opening a shell:
This image is commonly used in Dockerfiles, as in the following example:
This example Dockerfile will update apk
and install the Redis server onto the base image.
You could use a Dockerfile like this to build a new image:
Following that, you can run the new image built from the chainguard-base
image.
The chainguard-base
image uses the ash shell from BusyBox by default.
If you need to port a bash and Debian centric entrypoint script to Chainguard Images, you can update your scripts to work in ash. Alternatively, you can install the shell that works with your scripts.
For example:
Oftentimes, you’ll often need to install extra utilities to provide required dependencies for applications and scripts. These dependencies are likely to have different package names compared to other Linux distributions, so the apk search command can be very useful for finding the package you need.
For example, say you are porting a Dockerfile that uses the groupadd
command. You could convert this to the BusyBox addgroup
equivalent, but it’s also perfectly fine to add the groupadd
utility. The only issue is that there’s no groupadd
package, so you will have to search for it:
Another useful trick is the cmd: syntax
for finding packages that provide commands. For example, searching for ldd
returns multiple results:
But if you use the cmd:
syntax it will only return a single result:
You can even use the syntax directly in apk add
:
The following resources provide helpful information on working with Chainguard's base images. Note that some of these resources focus on the wolfi-base
image — the free-tier alternative to the chainguard-base
image — but these same principles and practices apply to chainguard-base
.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Chainguard container images contain software packages that are direct or transitive dependencies. The following licenses were found in the "latest" version of this image:
Apache-2.0
GCC-exception-3.1
GPL-2.0-only
GPL-2.0-or-later
GPL-3.0-or-later
LGPL-2.1-or-later
MIT
For a complete list of licenses, please refer to this Image's SBOM.
Software license agreementA FIPS validated version of this image is available for FedRAMP compliance. STIG is included with FIPS image.