Recently, we've been working hard to expand our library of Chainguard Images. Say you want to try out one of these new images, but you aren't sure where to start. What's a developer to do?
A big part of helping developers on this journey is making resources and documentation readily available for Chainguard Images on Chainguard Academy. This is why we've released new Getting Started Guides for Chainguard Images to help you start building secure-by-default applications with our Images. This blog post highlights examples of this new and engaging example-driven documentation for Chainguard Images.
Getting started with Getting Started guides
It may be a cliché, but the best way to learn is by doing. Having practical examples to follow can help to crystallize complex concepts and make them more tangible. This is especially true for abstract ideas like containers or software supply chain security.
To this end, we added more Getting Started guides to our library of Chainguard Images reference documentation. Our Getting Started guides are meant to get you up and running with a Chainguard Image. Each of these guides are self-contained and explain everything you need to know to understand how the given Image works.
We also don't want to leave readers with something complex and unwieldy that might be hard to understand. Instead, our goal is to leave you with a working example that you can build on. As they say, "Give someone apples and you feed them for a day. Teach people to grow apple trees and you feed them for a lifetime."
This is also why we've been building each of our Getting Started guides around a standalone demo application. Take, for example, our recent guide on Getting Started with the MariaDB Chainguard Image.
This tutorial's demo application involves downloading and running a sample application. This application creates a LEMP (Linux, (E)NGINX, MariaDB and PHP-FPM) environment based on Wolfi-based Chainguard Images. Once the environment is up, you will be able to access the demo application in your web browser.
Any time you visit the application, it will perform a few actions:
Every time you reload the page, a new entry will be added to the table. The application will record every visit in the MariaDB database and present the each record in the browser:
![Image showing the output of the sample MariaDB application described previously. Screenshot showing a Firefox web browser window with "localhost:8000" in the address bar. On the page is the following text: "Array ( [data_key] => code [data_value] => 7064 ), Array ( [data_key] => code [data_value] => 7006 ) Array ( [data_key] => code [data_value] => 7507 )". This indicates that the page was refreshed twice since the previous screenshot.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/6228fdbc6c971401d02a9c42/655cdd85058b8c0656acd9d7_YUsuMhuYDkCmeiF6Nt1KH0j5tnotwTMuyULiVdAnp6dApkk6bKs-G_juUo0eA2-8QvvgNTDUu7rJGuSOL0xkWHbLSLSyrp2jps4y54gV1hh1RM7Dzi5iyY6gMbF8f3Oq3aseqaYCGj051IW5pdgHdHM.png)
Our goal is to help our readers better understand how to use Chainguard Images. By keeping things simple we can make these complex concepts more approachable to a wider audience.
Additionally, we've worked to make these Getting Started guides more discoverable. We have dedicated pages for all our public Chainguard Images where you can find related Reference documentation. All our Getting Started guides are on a single landing page. Our hope is that doing so will make these guides easier to find for our readers.
Looking forward
We will continue adding to our library of Chainguard Images resources. Keep an eye out for more Getting Started guides with practical examples that show our Images in action. We encourage you to check out all our product documentation and educational resources on Chainguard Academy. You can also find the code for all our sample Chainguard Image applications by visiting our dedicated public GitHub repository.
If you have any questions — or if you just want to learn more about Chainguard Images or want to see an Image we don’t currently have in our inventory — please reach out through the following contact form.
