harbor-prepare-fips

Chainguard Container for harbor-prepare-fips

Configuration generator for Harbor container registry deployments, creating docker-compose files and internal certificates.

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/harbor-prepare-fips: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 harbor-prepare-fips image is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the upstream goharbor/prepare image with FIPS-validated cryptographic modules. There are some notable differences:

User

This image runs as root by default (same as upstream) because the prepare command requires chown permissions to set file ownership on generated configuration directories. See the upstream implementation:

• prepare.py#L41
• portal.py#L10
• misc.py#L87 (prepare_dir)
• misc.py#L110 (recursive_chown)

Environment variables

The Chainguard image does not set the LANG environment variable. If your configuration generation relies on locale settings, you can set this explicitly:

docker run -e LANG=en_US.UTF-8 cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/harbor-prepare-fips ...

FIPS Support

This image is FIPS-validated and uses FIPS-compliant cryptographic modules for all certificate generation and cryptographic operations. The FIPS-validated OpenSSL module is used automatically when generating internal CA certificates and processing cryptographic operations.

For more information on FIPS compliance in Chainguard images, see the FIPS documentation.

Prerequisites

• Docker installed and running
• Access to the Chainguard registry with your organization credentials
• A valid harbor.yml configuration file (see the Harbor installation guide for details)

Getting Started

The harbor-prepare-fips image is used to generate configuration files and certificates for a Harbor deployment. It provides CLI commands for preparing Harbor's runtime configuration using FIPS-validated cryptography.

Viewing available commands

To see the available commands:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/harbor-prepare-fips --help

Generating internal certificates

The gencert command generates internal CA certificates for Harbor component communication:

mkdir -p certs

docker run --rm \
  -v $(pwd)/certs:/tmp \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/harbor-prepare-fips gencert -p /tmp

This creates harbor_internal_ca.crt and harbor_internal_ca.key files in the certs directory.

Generating Harbor configuration

The prepare command generates all configuration files needed for a Harbor deployment. You need a harbor.yml configuration file and appropriate output directories:

mkdir -p workdir/common/config workdir/secret/keys

docker run --rm \
  -v $(pwd)/harbor.yml:/input/harbor.yml:ro \
  -v $(pwd)/workdir:/compose_location \
  -v $(pwd)/workdir/common/config:/config \
  -v $(pwd)/workdir/secret/keys:/secret/keys \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/harbor-prepare-fips prepare --conf /input/harbor.yml

This generates:

• docker-compose.yml for running Harbor with Docker Compose
• Configuration directories for Harbor core components (core, registry, db, nginx, and others)

Configuration

Volume mounts

The harbor-prepare-fips image requires several volume mounts for configuration generation:

CLI commands

Documentation and Resources

• Harbor Official Documentation
• Harbor Installation and Configuration Guide
• Harbor Configuration File Reference
• Harbor GitHub Repository
• Chainguard FIPS Documentation

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.