claude

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for claude

Minimalist Wolfi-based image for running Anthropic's Claude Code CLI in a container.

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/claude: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 claude image provides a containerized version of Anthropic's Claude Code CLI, an agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, and helps you code faster through natural language commands.

• Built on Wolfi with a minimal footprint and fewer CVEs
• Does not run as root by default (runs as UID 65532)
• Provides an alternative to the npm-based installation (npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code)
• Ships the native claude binary from the claude APK, published to the extra-packages repository

Getting Started

Claude Code is an AI-powered command-line tool that brings Anthropic's Claude AI directly to your terminal. To use it, you'll need an Anthropic API key or an active Claude subscription.

Running with an API Key

Set your Anthropic API key as an environment variable and run the container:

docker run --rm -e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_api_key cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/claude:latest --help

Interactive Mode

For interactive coding sessions, run the container with a TTY and mount your project directory:

docker run --rm -it \
  -e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_api_key \
  -v "$(pwd):/workspace" \
  -w /workspace \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/claude:latest

Checking the Version

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/claude:latest --version

Viewing Help

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/claude:latest --help

Configuration

Claude Code reads its configuration from environment variables and on-disk state. Common variables include:

Refer to the upstream project for the full list of supported environment variables and configuration options.

Documentation and Resources

• Claude Code GitHub Repository
• Anthropic Documentation
• Chainguard Academy

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.