gcc-glibc

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Integrate Chainguard into your developer workflows, manage your image versions to stay free of CVEs, and view critical SBOM and provenance details.

Chainguard Container for gcc-glibc

Minimal GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) image for building C applications compatible with glibc.

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/gcc-glibc: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 gcc-glibc Chainguard image was built to work as a drop-in replacement for the gcc official image from Docker Hub.

Unlike many other Chainguard images, the gcc-glibc image includes a shell, allowing you to log into the container and run commands interactively. It also runs as the root user by default. Despite these two differences, the image is still designed to be secure and minimal, and does not include a package manager. If you need a package manager, you can use the -dev variant of this image.

It's also worth noting that Chainguard's gcc-glibc image sets an entrypoint to /usr/bin/gcc, while the official gcc image lands on a shell by default when no arguments are passed to the docker run command. You can always use the --entrypoint argument with docker run to override the entrypoint if needed.

Getting Started

You can use the gcc-glibc image both to compile and to run C applications that are compatible with the GNU C Library (glibc). Consider the following hello.c program:


#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Hello World!\n");
    return 0;
}

To compile this program using the gcc-glibc Chainguard image, you can use the following command:


docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/work cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/gcc-glibc /work/hello.c -o hello

This will create a Linux binary called hello in your current folder. If your program has a Makefile, you can instead run make by replacing the image's entrypoint:


docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/work --entrypoint make cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/gcc-glibc

This will execute the application's Makefile in the container.

Using the gcc-glibc Image as a Runtime

To run the compiled program using the gcc-glibc image, you can use the following command:


docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/work --entrypoint /work/hello cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/gcc-glibc

This will replace the default entrypoint of the image, which is /usr/bin/gcc, with the hello binary you just compiled. Although this works and is a straightforward way to test your compiled program after building it, consider using instead the Chainguard glibc-dynamic image to run your compiled C applications in a slimmer and more production-ready runtime environment for C programs. The Getting Started with the C/C++ Chainguard Images guide on Chainguard Academy has detailed instructions on how to build multi-stage environments for C programs using both the gcc-glibc and glibc-dynamic images.

Usage in a Dockerfile

The following Dockerfile builds the example hello.c program and sets the entry point to the compiled binary:


FROM cgr.dev/chainguard/gcc-glibc:latest

COPY hello.c /work

RUN gcc -o hello hello.c && \
  cp /work/hello /usr/bin/hello 
    
USER 65532

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/hello"]

For production environments, consider using a combination of gcc-glibc and glibc-dynamic to build a final distroless image containing only what's necessary to run your compiled binary. The following example shows how to create such an image in a multi-stage Dockerfile:


FROM cgr.dev/chainguard/gcc-glibc:latest as builder

COPY hello.c /work

RUN gcc -o hello hello.c 

FROM cgr.dev/chainguard/glibc-dynamic:latest

COPY --from=builder /work/hello /usr/bin/

USER 65532

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/hello"]

For more details, check our Getting Started with the C/C++ Chainguard Images guide on Chainguard Academy.

Documentation and Resources

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.

Chainguard container images contain software packages that are direct or transitive dependencies. The following licenses were found in the "latest" tag of this image: