A small container image with apt available.

We want to have the smallest container image possible with apt available. Small images are great, but the power of apt is hard to live without.

These images are Debian-based, but they are not Debian, as they remove some Essential packages that are not needed in most containers (e.g. init). This does mean that while apt is available, with the whole Debian archive, some packages will not work correctly without also installing a missing Essential package.

These images also include an install_packages command that you can use instead of apt. This does two things:

1. Install the named packages, skipping prompts etc.
2. Clean up the apt metadata afterwards to keep the image small.

• Install debootstrap and debian-archive-keyring.
• sudo ./buildall

To build an individual image:

• sudo ./mkimage jessie.tar jessie

To test the resulting image:

• docker import -t minideb:jessie jessie.tar
• ./test minideb:jessie

Nami from Bitnami allows you to install Bitnami-maintained packages.

The namibase directory contains Dockerfiles for building images containing nami based on the minideb images. They will also be build by the buildall script. You will first have to download the nami-linux-x64.tar.gz tarball in to the namibase directory, but unfortunately there is no public source for those tarballs currently.

• Look at whether the process produces the same bits given the same inputs
  • It does not. /etc/shadow and /etc/group change, as well as /var/cache/ldconfig/aux-cache.
• Can we use a custom debootstrap script to avoid removing packages?
  • Yes, and allows to define a package set to include, rather than a list of packages to remove.
  • Requires to install some packages (e.g. mount) for running the process, that we would still want to remove afterwards.
• install_packages to also run the docs/locales/etc. cleanups