chainguard-dev/apko

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1668 stars · 225 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

apko is a Go CLI tool that builds and publishes OCI container images directly from Alpine apk packages using declarative YAML configuration, without a Dockerfile. It produces fully reproducible, small distroless-style images with built-in SBOM generation and optional s6 multi-process supervision.

Use cases

• build OCI container images from apk packages without a Dockerfile
• generate reproducible container images declaratively
• create small distroless-style base images
• produce SBOMs for container images
• publish images directly to a container registry
• run multiple processes in a container with s6 supervision

When to choose

• you want fast, bit-for-bit reproducible container builds from Alpine/Wolfi packages
• you prefer declarative YAML over Dockerfiles
• you need SBOMs and minimal distroless-style images for supply-chain security
• you build images in CI and want millisecond-scale builds

When to avoid

• your images are based on Debian/Ubuntu and apt, not apk
• you need complex multi-stage Dockerfile build logic
• you require building images from source rather than packages

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

build-tool container-runtime deployment developer-tools cloud-computing developer-tools security cli cross-platform oci-images apk alpine reproducible-builds sbom distroless container-images chainguard containers devops linux macos docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="chainguard-dev/apko")