Chainguard Container for perl-fips

Container image for building Perl applications with FIPS.

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/perl-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 perl-fips Chainguard Image provides a minimal Perl runtime suitable for workloads such as web applications, CLI utilities, interfacing with APIs, or other tasks. For external dependencies we provide a -dev variant which contains the cpan, cpanm and cpm package managers, apk and the busybox shell and utilities.

FIPS Support

The perl-fips Chainguard Image ships with a validated redistribution of the OpenSSL's FIPS provider module. For more on FIPS support in Chainguard Images, consult the guide on FIPS-enabled Chainguard Images on Chainguard Academy

• However, due to Perl being an interpreted language there may be external libraries that are not strictly compliant with OpenSSL's FIPS provider module, any external dependency should be reviewed before being executed in a FIPS environment

Getting started

You can test this image locally with docker:

docker run --rm -it cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/perl-fips:latest

Example: HTTP server using external library

The following build demonstrates how a standard HTTP server could be implemented using Chainguard's perl development image.

First, create a project folder and change the working directory to that folder:

mkdir -p ~/perl-http-server && cd $_

Next, write a file defining your HTTP server (app.pl):

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTTP::Daemon;

my $d = HTTP::Daemon->new(LocalPort => 8080) or die "Can't create server: $!";
print "Server running at: " . $d->url . "\n";

while (my $c = $d->accept) {
    while (my $r = $c->get_request) {
        # Here you can write handlers for HTTP requests
        $c->send_response(HTTP::Response->new(200, "OK", ['Content-Type' => 'text/plain'], "Hello, Perl!"));
    }
    $c->close;
    undef $c;
}

Write a Dockerfile to define our image build:

FROM cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/perl-fips:latest-dev

COPY ./app.pl /

RUN cpanm HTTP::Daemon

ENTRYPOINT [ "perl" ]
CMD [ "/app.pl" ]

Build the image, tagging it perl-http-server:

docker build -t "localhost/perl-http-server:latest" .

Run the image exposing the port defined in the application code:

docker run -p 8080:8080 localhost/perl-http-server:latest

You should see output similar to the following on the container logs:

Server running at: http://127.0.0.1:8080/

When fetching the contents of localhost:8080 via a tool like curl, you will see the following:

Hello, Perl!

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard Containers are minimal container images that are secure by default.

In many cases, the Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Containers are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro 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 -dev variant.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to leverage the -dev variants, copying application artifacts into a final minimal container that offers a reduced attack surface that won’t allow package installations or logins.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Containers, please visit Chainguard Academy and Chainguard Courses.

In addition to Containers, Chainguard offers VMs and Libraries. Contact Chainguard to access additional products.

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.