docs/debian

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

• buster, buster-20170907 (buster/Dockerfile)
• buster-slim (buster/slim/Dockerfile)
• experimental, experimental-20170907 (experimental/Dockerfile)
• jessie, jessie-20170907, 8.9, 8 (jessie/Dockerfile)
• jessie-backports (jessie/backports/Dockerfile)
• jessie-slim (jessie/slim/Dockerfile)
• oldoldstable, oldoldstable-20170907 (oldoldstable/Dockerfile)
• oldoldstable-backports (oldoldstable/backports/Dockerfile)
• oldoldstable-slim (oldoldstable/slim/Dockerfile)
• oldstable, oldstable-20170907 (oldstable/Dockerfile)
• oldstable-backports (oldstable/backports/Dockerfile)
• oldstable-slim (oldstable/slim/Dockerfile)
• rc-buggy, rc-buggy-20170907 (rc-buggy/Dockerfile)
• sid, sid-20170907 (sid/Dockerfile)
• sid-slim (sid/slim/Dockerfile)
• stable, stable-20170907 (stable/Dockerfile)
• stable-backports (stable/backports/Dockerfile)
• stable-slim (stable/slim/Dockerfile)
• stretch, stretch-20170907, 9.1, 9, latest (stretch/Dockerfile)
• stretch-backports (stretch/backports/Dockerfile)
• stretch-slim (stretch/slim/Dockerfile)
• testing, testing-20170907 (testing/Dockerfile)
• testing-slim (testing/slim/Dockerfile)
• unstable, unstable-20170907 (unstable/Dockerfile)
• unstable-slim (unstable/slim/Dockerfile)
• wheezy, wheezy-20170907, 7.11, 7 (wheezy/Dockerfile)
• wheezy-backports (wheezy/backports/Dockerfile)
• wheezy-slim (wheezy/slim/Dockerfile)

Quick reference

• Where to get help:
  the Docker Community Forums, the Docker Community Slack, or Stack Overflow

• Where to file issues:
  https://github.com/debuerreotype/docker-debian-artifacts/issues

• Maintained by:
  Debian Developers tianon and paultag

• Published image artifact details:
  repo-info repo's repos/debian/ directory (history)
  (image metadata, transfer size, etc)

• Image updates:
  official-images PRs with label library/debian
  official-images repo's library/debian file (history)

• Source of this description:
  docs repo's debian/ directory (history)

• Supported Docker versions:
  the latest release (down to 1.6 on a best-effort basis)

What is Debian?

Debian is an operating system which is composed primarily of free and open-source software, most of which is under the GNU General Public License, and developed by a group of individuals known as the Debian project. Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions for personal computers and network servers, and has been used as a base for several other Linux distributions.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian

About this image

The debian:latest tag will always point the latest stable release (which is, at the time of this writing, debian:stretch). Stable releases are also tagged with their version (ie, debian:8 is an alias for debian:jessie, debian:7 is an alias for debian:wheezy, etc).

The rolling tags (debian:stable, debian:testing, etc) use the rolling suite names in their /etc/apt/sources.list file (ie, deb http://deb.debian.org/debian testing main).

The mirror of choice for these images is the deb.debian.org CDN pointer/redirector so that it's as reliable as possible for the largest subset of users (and is also the default mirror for debootstrap as of 2016-10-20). See the deb.debian.org homepage for more information.

If you find yourself needing a Debian release which is EOL (and thus only available from archive.debian.org), you should check out the debian/eol image, which includes tags for Debian releases as far back as Potato (Debian 2.2), the first release to fully utilize APT.

Locales

Given that it is a faithful "minbase" install of Debian, this image only includes the C, C.UTF-8, and POSIX locales by default. For most uses requiring a UTF-8 locale, C.UTF-8 is likely sufficient (-e LANG=C.UTF-8 or ENV LANG C.UTF-8).

For uses where that is not sufficient, other locales can be installed/generated via the locales package. PostgreSQL has a good example of doing so, copied below:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y locales && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* \
	&& localedef -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias en_US.UTF-8
ENV LANG en_US.utf8

How It's Made

The rootfs tarballs for this image are built using the reproducible-Debian-rootfs tool, debuerreotype, with an explicit goal being that they are transparent and reproducible. Using the same toolchain, it should be possible to regenerate (clean-room!) the same tarballs used for building the official Debian images.

Additionally, the scripts in https://github.com/debuerreotype/docker-debian-artifacts are used to create each tag's Dockerfile and collect architecture-specific tarballs into a single place (for placement into dist-ARCH branches on the same repository, which also contain extra metadata about the artifacts included in each build, such as explicit package versions).

Image Variants

debian:<suite>-slim

These tags are an experiment in providing a slimmer base (removing some extra files that are normally not necessary within containers, such as man pages and documentation), and are definitely subject to change.

See the debuerreotype-slimify script (debuerreotype linked above) for more details about what gets removed during the "slimification" process.