Building and modifying Chainguard Containers on

Adding a package to a Chainguard Container

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chainguard Containers ship with only the packages their application needs, so sooner or later you’ll want one that isn’t there. Custom Assembly is the supported way to add it. You declare the package you want, Chainguard builds the image on its own infrastructure, and Chainguard rebuilds that image whenever the package is updated. You can drive Custom Assembly from the Chainguard Console, interactively with chainctl, or non-interactively with chainctl from a pipeline.

Installing APK packages in distroless variants

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:01 +0000

This page documents workflows for installing APK packages in distroless variants of Chainguard container images, such as most builds tagged :latest. We copy a filesystem from a distroless container image to a build image, install APKs to it using chroot, then copy the modified filesystem back to the distroless image in the final step.

Overview: Installing packages in distroless containers

Note: The chroot workflow on this page is one of several ways to add a package to a Chainguard Container, and it’s the most involved. For a comparison of all of them, see Adding a package to a Chainguard Container.

Building minimal container images

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 15:21:01 +0000

The less software a container image holds, the less there is to transfer, to maintain, and to attack. Chainguard’s distroless container images take that as far as it goes: no shell, no package manager, and only the libraries the application needs.

That raises a practical question: without a shell or a package manager, how do you get your application into the image? The answer is a multi-stage build. One stage compiles or assembles your application with all the tooling that requires, and the final stage copies the result into a minimal base. This page covers both shapes that build takes, depending on whether your application needs a language runtime once it’s running.

Chainguard packages

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:48:45 +0000

Build tools

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000