Containers: Apko from Chainguard

Effortlessly create your distroless container images

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Introduction

Apko is a command line tool from Chainguard that allow you to build container images via a yaml configuration.

The application employs the APK package format sourced from Alpine, drawing inspiration from ko and, consequently, earning its name.

Ko is a simple, fast container image builder for Go applications.

Between its features, we can find:

• Small images in the style of distroless. Faster boot time and smaller footprint on memory and disk.
• Secure by design. A smaller footprint means a smaller attack surface and less CVE (Common Vulnerability and Exposures)
• Fully reproducible. Two separate runs of Apko will produce the same result. This is impossible if you run an apk update in your Dockerfile. The package repository might have changed since you built the container last.
• Low learning curve. It’s just a YAML config and a build command.

I already talked about Apko in a previous article named Shrink to Secure: Kubernetes and Compact containers, where I introduced a few alternatives on how to shrink your container images to make them more secure.

Apko works well with another tool from Chainguard called Melange.

From the Github repo on Melange, we can read:

Build APK packages using declarative pipelines.

Commonly used to provide custom packages for container images built with apko. The majority of APKs are built for use with either the Wolfi or Alpine Linux ecosystems.

With the combination of Melange and Apko, you can build containers from source code similar to what Buildpacks.io does. I’ll cover Buildpacks in a future article to keep this article short.

I would argue that if you only need to package some pre-existing APK packages, you just need Apko and not Melange.

In this article, we are going to use Apko to build an image called debug-tools that contains some command line tools. I use this image to debug my Kubernetes applications with ephemeral containers.

If you are not familiar with ephemeral containers, from the official Kubernetes documentation on how to debug with an ephemeral container you can read:

Ephemeral containers are useful for interactive troubleshooting when kubectl exec is insufficient because a container has crashed or a container image doesn't include debugging utilities, such as with distroless images.

How to build

Before we start building container images with Apko, we need to generate a pair of public/private keys with Melange.

We can use the following commands:

MELANGE_IMAGE=cgr.dev/chainguard/melange@sha256:5a14ffc28fce6f65a231b6ef37a03d013734e47a7ce0a0cc394190bc213616e8 # v0.4.0

# generate melange.rsa.pub to sign your container images
docker run --rm \
    -v "${PWD}":/work \
    $MELANGE_IMAGE \
    keygen

I lied before that we don’t need Melange. We need it but only to generate those two keys. We are not going to use it to build APK packages from source code.

Here we fix the version of Melange by using the latest digest for that image.

This is because it has been announced by Chainguard a policy change that will prevent an anonymous user from pulling image tags other than latest and latest-dev. Since you can still pull images by digest, this is my preferred way to pin to a specific version of the image for future proofing my scripts.

Once you have the keys, you can now build the container image by using the following commands:

APKO_IMAGE=cgr.dev/chainguard/apko@sha256:d2105dd448d9ef2939a5c5fbb135f99b352350af66ae67949b1ba272e0919792 # v0.9.0

# build my image
docker run --rm \
    -v "${PWD}":/work \
    $APKO_IMAGE \
    build apko.yaml \
    docker.io/gsantoro/debug-tools:latest \
    debug-tools.tar \
    -k melange.rsa.pub

Similarly to the previous command, here I have pinned the version of Apko.

The previous command uses the configuration provided below in the file apko.yaml:

contents:
  repositories:
    - https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main
  packages:
    - alpine-base
    - iputils-ping
    - bind-tools
    - curl
entrypoint:
  command: /bin/sh -l
archs:
  - x86_64
  - arm64
accounts:
  groups:
    - groupname: nonroot
      gid: 65532
  users:
    - username: nonroot
      uid: 65532
  run-as: nonroot
environment:
  PATH: /usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin

From the previous config, you can notice:

1. It used a package repository for APK packages. Namely https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main.
2. It installs some packages defined in the section packages.
3. It provides an entrypoint command. Here just a simple shell command.
4. It builds for two different architectures x86_64 and arm64. We could have provided more versions.
5. We create a user and a group both called nonroot and we run the container with that user instead of root. This is for security reasons.
6. We configure an environment variable PATH. This is just optional here. We could have set any of other environment variables.

I believe the previous config really shows what is possible with Apko. For more information on the file format you can have a look here.

Inspect the results

Now that the image has been built, we can load it into Docker from the tar file:

docker load < debug-tools.tar

Two images will be loaded gsantoro/debug-tools:latest-amd64 and gsantoro/debug-tools:latest-arm64 since we provided two architecture values.

If you want to test to see how it works, you can run the following command to enter the container shell:

docker run --rm -it gsantoro/debug-tools:latest-arm64

Finally, we can inspect the image, thanks to the tool called dive:

dive docker.io/gsantoro/debug-tools:latest-arm64

The interesting thing about this image, it’s that there is a single layer and it very small. With Dockerfile we got used to having many layers and optimizing the caching of those layers by reordering the commands to execute. With Apko we don’t care about any of that.

Here you have some stats for one of those images:

Image name: docker.io/gsantoro/debug-tools:latest-arm64
Total Image size: 31 MB                                 
Potential wasted space: 0 B                             
Image efficiency score: 100 %

Bonus point, you can achieve a 100% image efficiency score. Neat!

Scanning that image returns 0 vulnerabilities

docker scout cves docker.io/gsantoro/debug-tools:latest-arm64

Here you have, we created a very small and secure container image with a simple YAML configuration file.

You can find both those two images on Docker Hub at debug-tools.

Personal note

Before I bumped into Apko and Chainguard, I discovered a while ago the distroless images from Google.

Google was the first to introduce images without a proper Operating System, that only contain the software strictly necessary to run your application.

It was a game changer, but while using distroless images was always straightforward like any other base image in a multi-stage Docker build. Building a distroless image was not so easy until Apko came to life.

Google builds its distroless images using Bazel a complex tool that is mainly used to build Java or C++ projects. Having abandoned the world of Java a while ago and since the last time I wrote any C++ was in University a while ago, I never even considered even looking into Bazel.

With Apko instead, the learning curve is very low. You put together a config in YAML and then run the build command from a Docker image as we have shown in this article.

I don’t think it could get any easier than this.

Conclusion

Apko has now become my tool of choice when I want to just pack already available APK packages into a container image for multiple architectures.

If you were to reproduce the same outcome in Docker, you could either use the command docker manifest or alternatively docker buildx. The first option involves quite a few commands, while buildx is still experimental in docker. You can find more information about both those commands here.

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This article was originally posted at Apko from Chainguard