Chainguard Container for perl

Container image for building Perl applications.

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: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 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.

Getting started

You can test this image locally with docker:

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

Documentation References

• Perl Documentation
• Perl docker image documentation
• CPAN FAQ

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.