distroless VS dockerfiles

Compare distroless vs dockerfiles and see what are their differences.

distroless

🥑 Language focused docker images, minus the operating system. (by GoogleContainerTools)

dockerfiles

Various Dockerfiles I use on the desktop and on servers. (by jessfraz)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
distroless dockerfiles
122 34
17,487 13,454
2.0% -
9.3 0.0
6 days ago 7 months ago
Starlark Dockerfile
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

distroless

Posts with mentions or reviews of distroless. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-14.
  • Chainguard Images now available on Docker Hub
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Mar 2024
    lots of questions here regarding what this product is. I guess i can provide some information for the context, from a perspective of an outside contributor.

    Chainguard Images is a set of hardened container images.

    They were built by the original team that brought you Google's Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless)

    However, there were few problems with Distroless:

    1. distroless were based on Debian - which in turn, limited to Debian's release cadence for fixing CVE.

    2. distroless is using bazelbuild, which is not exactly easy to contrib, customize, etc...

    3. distroless images are hard to extend.

    Chainguard built a new "undistro" OS for container workload, named Wolfi, using their OSS projects like melange (for packaging pkgs) and apko (for building images).

    The idea is (from my understanding) is that

    1. You don't have to rely on upstream to cut a release. Chainguard will be doing that, with lots of automation & guardrails in placed. This allow them to fix vulnerabilties extremely fast.

  • Long Term Ownership of an Event-Driven System
    4 projects | dev.to | 2 Oct 2023
    The same as our code dependencies, container updates can include security patches and bug fixes and improvements. However, they can also include breaking changes and it is crucial you test them thoroughly before putting them into production. Wherever possible, I recommend using the distroless base image which will drastically reduce both your image size, your risk vector, and therefore your maintenance version going forward.
  • Minimizing Nuxt 3 Docker Images
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Aug 2023
    # Use a large Node.js base image to build the application and name it "build" FROM node:18-alpine as build WORKDIR /app # Copy the package.json and package-lock.json files into the working directory before copying the rest of the files # This will cache the dependencies and speed up subsequent builds if the dependencies don't change COPY package*.json /app # You might want to use yarn or pnpm instead RUN npm install COPY . /app RUN npm run build # Instead of using a node:18-alpine image, we are using a distroless image. These are provided by google: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless FROM gcr.io/distroless/nodejs:18 as prod WORKDIR /app # Copy the built application from the "build" image into the "prod" image COPY --from=build /app/.output /app/.output # Since this image only contains node.js, we do not need to specify the node command and simply pass the path to the index.mjs file! CMD ["/app/.output/server/index.mjs"]
  • Build Your Own Docker with Linux Namespaces, Cgroups, and Chroot
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2023
    Lots of examples without the entire OS as other comments mention, an example would be Googles distroless[0]

    [0]: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

  • Reddit temporarily ban subreddit and user advertising rival self-hosted platform (Lemmy)
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 7 Jun 2023
    Docker doesn't do this all the time. Distroless Docker containers are relatively common. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
  • Why elixir over Golang
    10 projects | /r/elixir | 29 May 2023
    Deployment: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
  • Reviews
    3 projects | /r/golang | 17 May 2023
    Or use distroless image as it includes one, among others. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/main/base/README.md
  • MRSK: Deploy Web Apps Anywhere
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Apr 2023
    I find Docker running a full Linux userspace a little bloated. Thankfully there are distroless base images(https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless). Haven't done service dev in a while, so I don't really have experience with this, but it looks promising.
  • Is it ok not to be able to run application locally?
    6 projects | /r/golang | 27 Apr 2023
    One of the things we did that helped was to use Go for fast builds, and then we build our binary into Google’s distroless base container image. This makes really tiny images (like 20-30MB images) so uploading the container images to our container repository and deploying to our dev K8S cluster is super fast! This helps make deploys fast.
  • Fearless Distroless
    3 projects | dev.to | 20 Apr 2023
    -- "Distroless" Container Images

dockerfiles

Posts with mentions or reviews of dockerfiles. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-20.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing distroless and dockerfiles you can also consider the following projects:

distrobox - Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox

iron-alpine - Hardened alpine linux baseimage for Docker.

spring-boot-jib - This project is about Containerizing a Spring Boot Application With Jib

jib - 🏗 Build container images for your Java applications.

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

docker-bloodhound - BloodHound Docker Ready to Use

docker-alpine - Official Alpine Linux Docker image. Win at minimalism!

jellyfin-media-player - Jellyfin Desktop Client based on Plex Media Player

whalebrew - Homebrew, but with Docker images

example-bazel-monorepo - 🌿💚 Example Bazel-ified monorepo, supporting Golang, Java, Python, Scala, and Typescript

docker-flutter - flutter docker image with full android sdk

fpm - Effing package management! Build packages for multiple platforms (deb, rpm, etc) with great ease and sanity.