Chainguard Image for tomcat

Tomcat is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies.

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/tomcat: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 Chainguard Apache Tomcat image is meant to serve as a drop-in replacement for the official Tomcat image.

Like most of Chainguard's images, this image does not operate as the root user and includes only the minimum packages needed to function.

Getting Started

To start up the tomcat server:

docker run cgr.dev/chainguard/tomcat:latest

This shows you the Apache Tomcat log output as the server boots, so you can check for any errors and confirm that Tomcat is running.

If you are running this container on your local machine for testing, you can modify the original docker run by forwarding requests to a port on your host machine to one of the container's ports. This enables you to connect to the Tomcat server using your host computer's browser:

docker run -p 8080:8080 cgr.dev/chainguard/tomcat:latest

This again shows the Apache Tomcat log output as the server boots.

Now browse to http://localhost:8080 to see an Apache Tomcat 404 error page. Tomcat will return a 404 error because, by default, Tomcat ships with an empty webapps directory. Regardless, what you will see is a confirmation that the Tomcat server is running.

Documentation and Resources

You can find the official Tomcat documentation on the Apache Tomcat website.

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.