debco

README

debco

A declarative, BuildKit powered, Debian base system builder.

Inspired by apko, multistrap, debootstrap, and cloud-init.

Features

• Declarative - specify your base system in a YAML file.
• Reproducible - run the same command, get the same image.
• Secure - no need to trust a third party base image.
• Fast - uses BuildKit for caching and parallelism.
• Rootless - build images without root privileges.
• Cross platform - build images on any platform that supports Docker.

Installation

From APT

Add my apt repository to your system:

Currently packages are only published for Debian 12 (Bookworm).

curl -fsL https://apt.pecke.tt/signing_key.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/apt-pecke-tt-keyring.asc > /dev/null
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/apt-pecke-tt-keyring.asc] http://apt.pecke.tt $(. /etc/os-release && echo $VERSION_CODENAME) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/apt-pecke-tt.list > /dev/null

Then install debco:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install debco

GitHub Releases

Download statically linked binaries from the GitHub releases page:

Latest Release

Usage

Prerequisites

• Docker

Building a Image

To create a minimal Debian image:

debco build -c examples/bookworm-ultraslim.yaml

The resulting OCI archive will be saved to debian-image.tar.

Running the Image

You will need a recent release of the Skopeo (eg. v1.15.1) to copy the image into your Docker daemon cache as Docker does not have native support for loading OCI images.

skopeo copy oci-archive:debian-image.tar docker-daemon:debco/debian:bookworm-ultraslim

You can then run the image with:

docker run --rm -it debco/debian:bookworm-ultraslim sh

Using a Prebuilt Image

For convenience the debco build pipeline publishes a bookworm-ultraslim image. This image is intended for experimentation purposes only. You should build your own base images using the debco build command.

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/dpeckett/debco/debian:bookworm-ultraslim sh

Limitations

• Debian Bookworm and newer.