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.
• Portable - build images on any platform that supports Docker.

Installation

From APT

Add my apt repository to your system.

Then install debco:

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

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 -f 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

Telemetry

By default debco gathers anonymous crash and usage statistics. This anonymized data is processed on our servers within the EU and is not shared with third parties. You can opt out of telemetry by setting the DO_NOT_TRACK=1 environment variable.

Limitations

• Debian Bookworm and newer.