Summer, an ideal time to grow some containers! At Clyso, we are using Gardener extensively, with Clyso Linux by Garden Linux as base images for nodes and containers.
Composing an image
Clyso Linux is based on Debian Testing. The distribution’s repositories provide a curated set of base packages and can be installed and managed with the usual apt and dpkg utilities.
$ podman run --rm -it ghcr.io/gardenlinux/gardenlinux:1604.0 sh -c 'apt update && apt list | wc -l'
...
1994
$ podman run --rm -it debian:testing-20240812-slim sh -c 'apt update && apt list | wc -l'
...
66400
By comparison, Garden's repositories are much smaller than Debian's, and it is often necessary to add extra repositories when installing packages:
echo 'deb http://deb.debian.org/debian testing main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list
apt update
See gardenlinux/builder#31 issue for details about repository changes.
Building an image
The easiest and most idiomatic way to build a Clyso Linux based container image is to write a Dockerfile and use docker/podman/buildah or similar. See available gardenlinux base images.
Another way is to use gardenlinux/builder build tool. See Getting started docs on how to set up a build project and its features. Features then entirely replace the Dockerfile, as all build steps are specified there. To finally build the image, run:
feature='<Feature name>'
out_dir="<Path where to store build artifacts>/${feature}"
# Build the image. We are in the gardenlinux base directory.
TYPE=container build --target "${out_dir}" "${feature}"
# Now we just need to import the .tar OCI archive. For this example we are assuming amd64 arch.
podman import "${out_dir}/container-${feature}"-amd64-*-local.tar my-image
Note that the resulting image consists only of a single layer and is therefore not the best choice for normal use. Nevertheless, this is a handy way to test things before creating node images, which is the best use case of the tool.
Happy gardening!