A small base image designed for use in containers. The image is based on glibc for wide compatibility, and has apt for access to a large number of packages. The image is based on Debian, with some things that aren't required in containers removed:
- Some packages that aren't often used in containers (hardware related, init systems etc.)
- Some files that aren't usually required (docs, man pages, locales, caches)
This image aims to strike a good balance between having small images, and having many quality packages available for easy integration.
These images also include an install_packages command
that you can use instead of apt. This takes care of some things
for you:
- Install the named packages, skipping prompts etc.
- Clean up the apt metadata afterwards to keep the image small.
- Retrying if apt fails. Sometimes a package will fail to download due to a network issue, and this may fix that, which is particularly useful in an automated build pipeline.
e.g.
$ install_packages apache2 memcached
The minideb container image is the base image for many Bitnami-maintained language runtimes including php, nodejs, ruby and infrastructure components including mariadb, redis, nginx and mongodb.
The image points to the Debian archive, so you are free to
install packages from there that you need. However because
some Essential packages have been removed they may not
always install or work correctly.
In those cases you can figure out which package is needed and manually specify to install it along with your desired packages.
You can use the image directly, e.g.
$ docker run --rm -it bitnami/minideb:latest
There are tags for the different Debian releases.
$ docker run --rm -it bitnami/minideb:jessie
The images are built daily and have the security release enabled, so will contain any security updates released more than 24 hours ago.
You can also use the images as a base for your own Dockerfile:
FROM bitnami/minideb:jessie
You can build an image yourself if you wish:
- 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