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Building the World
The story behind Wolfi, the Linux undistro built for containers
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Hi, I'm Erika!
● Developer Experience Engineer at Chainguard
○ Writing docs, tutorials, presentations, demos…
● Open Source enthusiast
○ PHP Developer focused on CLI applications
○ Author of Minicli, Librarian, autodocs…
● Too many hobbies
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What is Wolfi
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● Small Linux Distro for Containers
● "Undistro" because it doesn't
have stuff that normally goes into
a Linux distribution
● Based on apk (the Alpine
package manager)
● Fast updates
What is Wolfi?
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● Has a design that facilitates reproducible builds
● System state is not changed if the apk resolver can't
"fix the world"
Why APK?
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Images Comparison
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Wolfi on GitHub
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How it all started
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How everything started
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Jason explains it all
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Naming is hard
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Boxxy memorial
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Wolfi it is
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Packages!!!
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Release Day - September 22, 2022
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The ecosystem
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melange
● Declarative apk builder tool
● Build pipelines are defined in YAML files
● Multi-architecture by default
● Platform-agnostic builds via Docker +
melange image
The Tools
apko
● Declarative OCI image builder tool based on
apk
● Generates flat images w/ a single layer
● Images are defined in YAML files
● Builds are fully reproducible
● Automatically generates SBOMs for every
image
● Platform-agnostic builds via Docker + apko
image
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Why apko: building distroless images
● Minimalist container images with only what's absolutely necessary to
build or execute your application
● Popular base images are full of software that only makes sense on
bare-metal
● No need for package managers or interactive shells on production
images
● Less dependencies = smaller attack surface, less CVEs
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PHP in Wolfi
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How PHP landed in Wolfi
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How PHP landed in Wolfi
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How PHP landed in Wolfi
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How PHP landed in Wolfi
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How PHP landed in Wolfi
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How PHP landed in Wolfi
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How PHP landed in Wolfi
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Building Wolfi-based PHP Images
● Use cgr.dev/chainguard/php:latest-dev with a Dockerfile and install missing dependencies
● Use cgr.dev/chainguard/wolfi-base:latest with a Dockerfile and install all dependencies
● Use apko for composing a flat, distroless image using Wolfi packages
3 ways to use Wolfi for your PHP runtimes
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Where we are today
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Happy birthday Wolfi!
From zero to 1600+ package configs in one year, which
builds into 18k+ packages available via Wolfi's repo
In the month of September, we
celebrated Wolfi's first birthday
🎉
18k+ packages
With more than 60 contributors from around the world and
a strong team of in-house maintainers, for a fast-paced
update cadence and new packages added daily
4k+ PRs merged
Is the average time it takes for a package to be updated or
patched to their latest release and made available
upstream
Less than 24h
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Learn more and get involved
● Wolfi documentation at Chainguard Academy
● Wolfi repository on GitHub
● Building a Wolfi Package - tutorial
● Issues tagged for Hacktoberfest
● Wolfi Community Call Calendar
● Wolfi on X/Twitter