apko

README

apko: APK-based OCI image builder

Build OCI images for apk-based distributions declaratively!

Why

When maintaining images at scale, the Dockerfile concept built into Docker is inefficient. If we have a collection of build artifacts, repositories and a keyring, we can build images directly with APK, and upload them directly to container registries.

In fact, we can do more than that: using a service like kontain.me, we can serve fresh container images on demand, with the latest package updates, using nothing but declarative configuration.

How

This part is very much a work in progress, but basically you need a system with apk (soon: libapk), and this apko tool. You probably also want the other Chainguard stack components as well, e.g. crane.

To build an image, use the apko build command:

# apko build config.yaml tag output.tar

This will give you a Docker-style tarball which you can use with docker load:

# docker load < output.tar

You can also publish an image using the apko publish command:

# apko publish config.yaml foo.dev/bar/baz:latest

You need root, or at least fakeroot + fakechroot to build images with apko, due to apk-tools' use of chroot(2).

Some example configurations are available in the examples directory.

Want to run apko on a mac? See here.

Features

Sub-second image build times

By using the very fast apk package manager to manage build artifacts, we can build images very quickly. This means that developers win with a faster and more easy to reproduce build process.

Service bundles

Some containers are complex, with multiple tightly-coupled services running in the same container. apko understands this scenario out of the box, avoiding the need to deal with things like s6-overlay. If you define a service-bundle entrypoint, it will generate an appropriate supervision tree and ensure s6 is installed.

SBOM (coming soon)

As a result of using apk to manage distribution and build artifacts, we will be able to generate SBOMs for containers, using the new apk-tools 3.x SBOM feature.