Convert from alpine to distroless image with shell

[Shahria Kazi]

Greetings distroless community,

I am trying to convert the below Dockerfile to build off of a distroless base image instead of an alpine image.

FROM alpine:3.7
WORKDIR /
CMD ["/bin/sh", "-c", "--"]

The only problem is that the Deployment resource where this container image is being used has some shell commands, hence i need to install shell into the distroless image. Below is part of the Deployment yaml file:

   containers:
      - name: my-container
        image: {{ .Values.image.acr }}
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        command: [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "--" ]
        args: [ "while true; do sleep 60; done;" ]

So far, I have tried to build the image using multi-stage builds, however, it's still not working for me:

FROM alpine:3.7 as builder
WORKDIR /
CMD ["/bin/sh", "-c", "--"]

FROM gcr.io/distroless/static
COPY --from=builder / /bin

When I run the container, i see this error: Error: failed to create containerd task: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:380: starting container process caused: exec: "/bin/sh": stat /bin/sh: no such file or directory: unknown.

In addition, I have tried to install shell into the image using this command:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install bash

however, the command itself requires shell being present. I was not able to find anything online related to this. I will appreciate your help!

[Andrew Latham]

Shahria

Distroless' design will likely not fit your use case. If you need the shell then you may want to use a full distro.

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- Andrew "lathama" Latham -

[Evan Jones]

There are two workarounds if you really still want to use distroless;

1. Use the :debug images: They include busybox, which has an implementation of /bin/sh. This should likely "just work" with the Dockerfile you shared?

2. Install bash (or some other shell) from Debian into your image. I have done this to install graphviz and its dependent libraries into a Distroless image. You will need to modify this example, but this should give you a general idea: https://github.com/evanj/pprofweb/blob/master/Dockerfile#L1-L7

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Evan Jones
https://www.evanjones.ca/