Debian Docker Images

This is a debian base image with an entrypoint and some common dependencies already set up. Currently the following tags/versions are available:

Trixie: trixie, testing
Bookworm: bookworm, stable, latest
Bullseye: bullseye, oldstable

Note that the testing, stable, latest and oldstable labels may at any time change to a newer distribution. If you want to ensure that your images use the same distribution any time, you should always refer to the release codename.

The images are updated automatically every weekend. If you have images building upon these then you can check the exact schedule in our workflow and have your own scheduled builds some time after these are built.

Included software

Besides the software included in the base docker images from debian, we include the following pieces of software:

curl - For downloading files
wget - For downloading files
ca-certificates - Trusted root certificates for HTTPS
apt-transport-https - For downloading apt repositories from HTTPS
gnupg - Working with gnupg, and setting up additional apt sigining keys
dirmngr - Setting up additional apt sigining keys
gosu - Allows efficient switching from root to another user, see below.
git - For accessing git repositories
dnsutils - To debug DNS issues
tmux - To run multiple shells simultaneously from a single one
nano - Basic editing
vim - Editor
lsof - Debug file access issues
unzip - Extracting zip files
libnss-wrapper - Dynamically fake user and group names
procps - Utilities for debugging currently running processes
strace - For tracing system calls
zutils - Tools for working with gzip/bzip2/lzip/xz

Usage

You can run this container as you would any other container, for example, to run a simple root container with an interactive bash, run:

docker run -it ghcr.io/tweedegolf/debian:stable bash

During development

Often during development you will change files from inside the container that are mounted as a volume. If we would use the root user as in the above command this would write any file as the root user. If you started the docker container under your local user you suddenly would have root files in between files from your local user.

To prevent this from happening, this image can be started with any user/group id. Using libnss_wrapper we then dynamically assign a username (app by default) and groupname to your user inside the container. As an example, see this command:

docker run -it --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" ghcr.io/tweedegolf/debian:stable bash

When you run this command you should see a prompt logged in as the app user. This user should have an effective user id and group id that is the same as the host system user you started the command from.

You can actually change the username/group name generated inside the container using environment variables:

docker run -it --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -e "DYNAMIC_USER_NAME=$(id -un)" -e "DYNAMIC_GROUP_NAME=$(id -gn)" ghcr.io/tweedegolf/debian:stable bash

The DYNAMIC_USER_NAME variable sets the name of the user and the DYNAMIC_GROUP_NAME sets the name of the group for the user. Note that changing the username has no effect on any permissions of your user, it only changes the display names.

The generated user will have a home directory at /home (without a username in the path) but you can change this using the DYNAMIC_USER_HOME environment variable. You can also change the login shell using DYNAMIC_USER_SHELL, although in most cases this has not much of a practical effect as you have to specify which command to start anyway.

Dynamic users and docker exec

When you want to launch an additional process in the same container docker provides the exec command (docker exec or docker compose exec when using compose). This will start an additional process that has access to the same resources as the process that initially started the container. However, if you run a command with exec the entrypoint will not run. Because of this, we can't setup libnss_wrapper and you may end up with I have no name! in your bash prompt when using a dynamic user. Some commands may also require a username and fail completely. To work around this you will have to manually call the entrypoint script. You can do this by prepending docker-entrypoint or doen to your command. If you would normally want to do:

docker exec container bash

Then you should instead run:

docker exec container doen bash

Note that you only have to do this if you want the entrypoint to run, so when you want to launch an additional root process as shown below, you will not need to use this.

Dynamic users and root

This image does not contain sudo by default and root does not have a password set up. Because of this you cannot simply change to root from the development user. If there is any command you need to run as root, you should use docker exec to run a command as root:

docker exec -it -u root container bash

Note that you do not need to prepend the entrypoint script as with dynamic users.

During production / extending this image

When using this image as a base for your production images you should have a specific user baked into the image instead of depending on the dynamic user feature. This means you should use useradd to create a new user when extending from this image. You can set the ROOT_SWITCH_USER environment variable to make sure that the image is then never run as root, but always automatically switches to another user when it starts as root, meaning a user of your application cannot forget doing this for themselves. Below is an example of how to extend this image:

FROM ghcr.io/tweedegolf/debian:stable
RUN useradd -c Application -m -U app
ENV ROOT_SWITCH_USER app
COPY --chown=app:app ./build /opt/application
CMD ["/opt/application/app"]

One other advantage of using the ROOT_SWITCH_USER setting over setting USER in your Dockerfile is that you can still send RUN commands in your Dockerfile as root, which can simplify the build process.

Running as root without auto switching

If you want to run your production image and you have set ROOT_SWITCH_USER in your Dockerfile, then you will have to explicitly set the ROOT_SWITCH_USER variable to an empty value, e.g.:

docker run -it -e "ROOT_SWITCH_USER=" ghcr.io/tweedegolf/debian:stable bash

Update ssh_known_hosts file

ssh-keyscan github.com > ssh_known_hosts
ssh-keyscan gitlab.com >> ssh_known_hosts
ssh-keyscan tgrep.nl >> ssh_known_hosts