Chainguard Image for couchdb

Apache CouchDB is an open-source, document-oriented NoSQL database implemented in Erlang.

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/couchdb: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 Chainguard couchdb image is intended to to be a drop-in replacement for the official CouchDB image and is meant to be run with the couchdb Helm chart.

Chainguard's CouchDB image stores its data in /usr/share/couchdb, with a symbolic link to /opt/couchdb to provide compatibility with the external image.

The uid/gid for the couchdb user is 65532.

Getting Started

The default entrypoint starts the CouchDB server. It needs the username and password to be provided via environment variables.

For example:

docker run \
  COUCHDB_USER=user -e COUCHDB_PASSWORD=s3cret \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/couchdb
[info] 2024-12-16T15:07:55.285349Z nonode@nohost <0.249.0> -------- Preflight check: Checking For Monsters
[info] 2024-12-16T15:07:55.287213Z nonode@nohost <0.249.0> -------- Preflight check: Asserting Admin Account
[info] 2024-12-16T15:07:55.291284Z nonode@nohost <0.249.0> -------- Apache CouchDB 3.3.3 is starting.
[info] 2024-12-16T15:07:55.291404Z nonode@nohost <0.250.0> -------- Starting couch_sup
[notice] 2024-12-16T15:07:55.306213Z nonode@nohost <0.104.0> -------- config: [admins] user set to '****' for reason nil
[info] 2024-12-16T15:07:55.368549Z nonode@nohost <0.249.0> -------- Apache CouchDB has started. Time to relax.

To add a volume to persist the data, mount it as /opt/couchdb/data, like this:

docker run \
  -v /path/to/couchdbstorage:/opt/couchdb/data \
  COUCHDB_USER=user -e COUCHDB_PASSWORD=s3cret \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/couchdb

The entrypoint script will provide permissions for the data so that the couchdb user can read and write to it.

Helm Chart Usage

The Chainguard CouchDB image can be used with the CouchDB Helm chart. To use the Chainguard image with the chart, provide the following values to it:

# provide UUID for the cluster, as required by the Helm chart
# NOTE: replace decafbaddecafbaddecafbaddecafbad with a valid UUID
couchdbConfig:
  couchdb:
    uuid=decafbaddecafbaddecafbaddecafbad
# use the Chainguard image with latest tag
image:
  repository: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/couchdb
  tag: latest

Assuming these values are saved as cgr_values.yaml, you will be able to run the following to install CouchDB:

helm repo add couchdb https://apache.github.io/couchdb-helm
helm install couchdb couchdb/couchdb --values cgr_values.yaml

User

By default the image starts as root user to perform chaning of permissions of storage data and initializing configuration. The couchdb server is then run as couchdb user.

It is also possible to run the image (and Helm chart) as couchdb user. To do it, simply pass -u 65532 flag to docker to specify the userid for couchdb - such as:

docker run \
  -u 65532 \
  COUCHDB_USER=user -e COUCHDB_PASSWORD=s3cret \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/couchdb

To set the user, group and default filesystem group to couchdb in the Helm chart, add the following to the values file:

containerSecurityContext:
  runAsUser: 65532
  runAsGroup: 65532
  fsGroup: 65532

When running the container as non-root, the volume permissions need to be set to the appropriate user and, in some cases, to the appropriate group, especially when using non-root approach with volumes containing existing data.

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.