Chainguard Image for grype

A vulnerability scanner for container images and filesystems

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/grype:latest

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

Image Variants

Our latest tag uses the most recent build of the Wolfi grype package. The following tagged variant is available without authentication:

• latest: This is an image for running grype commands. It does not include a shell or other applications.

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard's grype image is comparable to the official grype Image. but with the following changes:

• We use a different entrypoint /usr/bin/grype as compared to the upstream's endpoint /grype.
• We use a different CMD which is help whereas the upstream leaves it unset.
• We don't define any WorkingDir whereas the upstream sets it to /tmp.

Getting Started

grype help

This will automatically pull the image to your local system and execute the command grype help:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/chainguard/grype help


A vulnerability scanner for container images, filesystems, and SBOMs.

Supports the following image sources:
    grype yourrepo/yourimage:tag             defaults to using images from a Docker daemon
    grype path/to/yourproject                a Docker tar, OCI tar, OCI directory, SIF container, or generic filesystem directory

You can also explicitly specify the scheme to use:
    grype podman:yourrepo/yourimage:tag          explicitly use the Podman daemon
    grype docker:yourrepo/yourimage:tag          explicitly use the Docker daemon
    grype docker-archive:path/to/yourimage.tar   use a tarball from disk for archives created from "docker save"
    grype oci-archive:path/to/yourimage.tar      use a tarball from disk for OCI archives (from Podman or otherwise)
    grype oci-dir:path/to/yourimage              read directly from a path on disk for OCI layout directories (from Skopeo or otherwise)
    grype singularity:path/to/yourimage.sif      read directly from a Singularity Image Format (SIF) container on disk
    grype dir:path/to/yourproject                read directly from a path on disk (any directory)
    grype sbom:path/to/syft.json                 read Syft JSON from path on disk
    grype registry:yourrepo/yourimage:tag        pull image directly from a registry (no container runtime required)
    grype purl:path/to/purl/file                 read a newline separated file of purls from a path on disk

You can also pipe in Syft JSON directly:
	syft yourimage:tag -o json | grype

Usage:
  grype [command]

Documentation and Resources

• Grype's Official Getting Started
• Documentation
• Provenance Information

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.