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Learn answers to your questions about Chainguard Images.
Chainguard images are based on Wolfi, a Linux undistro we built specifically to address software supply chain security issues. We do have some images with Alpine-based variants in order to support musl or unusual architectures.
The Google distroless images follow a similar philosophy to many of our images: they are minimal images that don’t include package managers or shells. The main difference is in the implementation. The Google distroless images are built with Bazel and based on the Debian distribution, whereas Chainguard Images are built with apko based on the Wolfi or Alpine distributions. We believe our approach is more maintainable and extensible.
We call Wolfi an undistro because unlike a typical Linux distribution, Wolfi is a stripped-down distribution designed for the cloud-native era. Most notably, we don’t include a Linux kernel, instead relying on the environment (such as the container runtime) to provide this.
There are currently over 100 Chainguard Images available, which are segmented in three catalog tiers. You can read more about the tiers in the next question.
Our full Images Catalog is available on the Chainguard Console at https://console.enforce.dev/images/catalog (you will need to be logged in).
To review our public catalog, you can check out either the Chainguard Images Reference Docs or the GitHub Repository.
Chainguard Images are available through the Chainguard Registry.
The Public Chainguard Images Catalog is available at no cost to users. Our paid catalogs currently include Standard and Custom subscription tiers, featuring enterprise-grade patching SLAs and customer support.
The Public Catalog includes no cost access to the latest version of all images from applications and middleware, development and build tools and language runtimes.
The Standard Catalog includes the Public Catalog, plus all upstream supported older versions of programming languages and development tools. This includes Maven, Gradle, Kubectl, Ko, and more.
The Custom Catalog includes the Standard Catalog plus access to a custom set of images of your choosing. Chainguard offers a full suite of databases, web servers, proxies, monitoring tools, and SDK images.
Review the comparison table below for additional information about our catalog tiers.
:latest
:latest-dev
An SBOM is a Software Bill of Materials, which is a list containing detailed information about all software that is included within a software artifact, whether it’s an application, a container image, or a physical appliance.
SBOMs provide visibility into the software you depend on. They can allow automated systems to quickly identify issues such as unpatched vulnerabilities, since SBOMs typically include the version of each dependency listed.
Chainguard Images are officially maintained by Chainguard employees, but they are also open source, which means any community member is welcome to suggest improvements.
Chainguard Images are designed to be minimalist, and many of them are distroless, which means they don’t come with a package manager. Depending on your stack and specific dependencies, you may need to include additional software by combining development images and distroless images in a multi-stage Docker build.
Chainguard Images are rebuilt every night to ensure that new package versions and security updates in upstream Wolfi are quickly applied.
Logging in is optional if you are only using :latest and :latest-dev tags or image digests.
As of August 16, 2023, all other tags for Chainguard Images in the Public catalog are unavailable without paying for access to the Standard or Custom catalogs. This means that Public catalog users, including open source projects, will either need to pin to the digest they currently use, migrate to the software version associated with :latest, or build upon wolfi-base to build their desired image.
There are benefits for all users who authenticate to the Chainguard Registry, as Chainguard provides notifications of version updates, breaking changes, or critical security updates. However, users can continue to pull Images by digest or Images tagged :latest anonymously.
To learn how to authenticate into the Chainguard Registry, you can review our authentication documentation. You can read more about our Images catalogs and some of the thought process behind authentication in our blog post, Scaling Chainguard Images with a growing catalog and proactive security updates. You can read about the August 16, 2023 changes in the Important updates for Chainguard Images public catalog users blog post.