This repository is the source for the Docker images containerbase/base and ghcr.io/containerbase/base. It is not associated with or compatible with the buildpacks.io project. Commits to main branch are automatically build and published.

You need a recent docker version with buildx >= v0.4.0 plugin installed.

You first need to build the cli before building the docker images.

> yarn install
> yarn build

If you make changes to the src folder or the Dockerfile, you need to rebuild the containerbase/base image.

docker buildx bake

You can use the following command to ignore remote cache for local testing. This will probably speedup local builds.

docker buildx bake  --set *.cache-from=

To run one of the tests use the following command, it will run the java tests from test/java.

TAG=java docker buildx bake test

For other test images checkout test folder.

To run the jammy tests use the following command, it will run the test from test/Dockerfile.jammy.

TAG=jammy docker buildx bake test-distro

You can configure an Apt proxy for the build by specifying an APT_HTTP_PROXY argument.

Example: docker build --build-arg APT_HTTP_PROXY=https://apt.company.com . -t my/image

You can simply export APT_HTTP_PROXY to your local env and our build tools will use your apt proxy for http sources.

To use a custom base image with containerbase/base checkout custom-base-image docs.

To add custom root certificates to the containerbase/base base image checkout custom-root-ca docs.

To temporary disable / skip some tool installer set the build arg IGNORED_TOOLS to a comma separated case-insensitive tool names list.

The following sample will skip the installation of powershell and node.

FROM containerbase/base

ARG IGNORED_TOOLS=powershell,node


# renovate: datasource=github-releases packageName=PowerShell/PowerShell
RUN install-tool powershell v7.1.3

# renovate: datasource=docker versioning=docker
RUN install-tool node 14.17.3

# renovate: datasource=github-releases packageName=moby/moby
RUN install-tool docker 20.10.7

You can replace the default registries used to download the tools. Checkout custom-registries docs for more details.

The new cli has some new logging features. You can change the default info log level by setting the CONTAINERBASE_LOG_LEVEL¹ environment variable. If CONTAINERBASE_DEBUG is set to true the cli will automatically set log level to debug if not explicit set.

You can also log to a ndjson file via CONTAINERBASE_LOG_FILE and CONTAINERBASE_LOG_FILE_LEVEL environment variables. The default value for CONTAINERBASE_LOG_FILE_LEVEL is debug.