Chainguard Image now available for Bazel

Today we’re excited to share that Bazel is now available as a Chainguard Image. You might be familiar with our earlier work using Bazel to build containers, but now we’re using containers to build Bazel.

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Bazel is a popular build tool that’s designed for speed, scalability, security, and performance. Build tools form a critical role in the software supply chain, but they’re often neglected or looked over when thinking about production security. As “Reflections on Trusting Trust” taught us decades ago, securing production infrastructure is impossible without a secure toolchain.

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The Chainguard Bazel Image is built with the minimum required package set, keeping it slim for fast CI runs. This also means you have fewer CVEs to triage and remediate.

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As always, the binaries in our Images are built from source and come with comprehensive and Software Bills of Material (SBOMs) from the start. These SBOMs contain the package metadata for everything in the Image and can be used for vulnerability scanning or license compliance. You can download the SBOMs for these containers with cosign:

$ cosign download sbom --platform=linux/amd64 cgr.dev/chainguard/bazel
% ./cosign download sbom --platform=linux/amd64 cgr.dev/chainguard/bazel | head -n 50
WARNING: Downloading SBOMs this way does not ensure its authenticity. If you want to ensure a tamper-proof SBOM, download it using 'cosign download attestation ' or verify its signature.
Found SBOM of media type: spdx+json
{
  "SPDXID": "SPDXRef-DOCUMENT",
  "name": "sbom-sha256:3533b52c99d97466d5cdced7670aca356d22040421060f6e26d43169584708b9",
  "spdxVersion": "SPDX-2.3",
  "creationInfo": {
    "created": "2023-01-12T05:05:21Z",
    "creators": [
      "Tool: apko (canary)",
      "Organization: Chainguard, Inc"
    ],
    "licenseListVersion": "3.16"
  },
  "dataLicense": "CC0-1.0",
  "documentNamespace": "https://spdx.org/spdxdocs/apko/",
  "documentDescribes": [
    "SPDXRef-Package-sha256-cd2de453d52c4318af131f80b2493f0cd755fa8c4549779f7ba46b3869d092b1"
  ],
  "files": [
    {
      "SPDXID": "SPDXRef-File-/usr/lib/locale/C.utf8/LC_ADDRESS",
      "fileName": "/usr/lib/locale/C.utf8/LC_ADDRESS",
      "licenseConcluded": "NOASSERTION",
      "checksums": [
        {
          "algorithm": "SHA1",
          "checksumValue": "12d0e0600557e0dcb3c64e56894b81230e2eaa72"
        },
        {
          "algorithm": "SHA256",
          "checksumValue": "26e2800affab801cb36d4ff9625a95c3abceeda2b6553a7aecd0cfcf34c98099"
        },
        {
          "algorithm": "SHA512",
          "checksumValue": "d38b225e8204e1e85e6c631481f46d0b8fca8cf8d8dfc290f00adb15b605959f91f0d55dc830fdd82c22f916140090928e44f1b5123facac135705cc81df00b0"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "SPDXID": "SPDXRef-File-/usr/lib/locale/C.utf8/LC_COLLATE",
      "fileName": "/usr/lib/locale/C.utf8/LC_COLLATE",
      "licenseConcluded": "NOASSERTION",
      "checksums": [
        {
          "algorithm": "SHA1",
          "checksumValue": "f245e3207984879d0b736c9aa42f4268e27221b9"
        },
        {
          "algorithm": "SHA256",
          "checksumValue": "47a5f5359a8f324abc39d69a7f6241a2ac0e2fbbeae5b9c3a756e682b75d087b"
        },

If you want to see upwards of a 27% reduction in your Image sizes (see footnotes) with more security built in by default start using Chainguard’s Bazel Image today at github.com/chainguard-images, or get started with our Bazel Image using documentation in Chainguard Academy. Chainguard Images are currently for Redis, curl, Git, Go, Jenkins, Postgres, Ruby and more. We currently offer our public Chainguard Images catalog for no cost to users, which includes features like SBOMs, signatures and SLSA Build Level 2 provenance information. If your organization requires patching SLAs, older version support or Images for compliance requirements, we offer Standard and Custom subscription tiers. Contact our team to learn more.

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We are always looking for ways to improve our end user experience. If you have feedback or would like to submit a support issue you can reach out to us directly or file it here.

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Update on our Chainguard Images Catalog: On August 16, 2023, we will be making changes to how Chainguard Image tags are pulled. Please see this announcement for further details about accessing our free, public Image catalog.

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1. Comparing gcr.io/bazel-public/bazel:latest to cgr.dev/chainguard/bazel:latest:

$ docker images --digests
REPOSITORY                  TAG       DIGEST                                                                    IMAGE ID       CREATED       SIZE
cgr.dev/chainguard/bazel    latest    sha256:c3e856aa0886bd534d9f39c2db70d5670b98f0a9be2ab20cb487e3128bb4e3b3   9b2ee14765ae   8 hours ago   724MB
gcr.io/bazel-public/bazel   latest    sha256:0a9fb6c7bb0db386888a26940e87829ffad4d2a6bc12bcc32523670ef9ea6505   a33cac676d1b   4 weeks ago   996MB

27% reduction in image size, also note difference in time since rebuild.