Ross ROSS = Recommend OSS · open-source software intelligence for agents

GoogleContainerTools/distroless resource

🥑 Language focused docker images, minus the operating system. observed · 2026-08-28

github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless · Starlark · Apache-2.0 (permissive) observed · 2026-08-28

Health v2 · maintenance only

77/100

  • Activity 99
  • Release rhythm 35
  • Longevity 100

Flags: no_releases

How is this computed?

round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-03. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.

  • gap_med: n/a
  • age_days: 3424
  • days_rel: n/a
  • days_push: 7
  • n_releases_24m: 0

Full methodology

Adoption not part of the score

23037 stars · 1434 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Distroless is a set of minimal Docker base images published by Google that contain only an application's runtime dependencies, with no package managers, shells, or other OS tooling. Images are built with Bazel and published for multiple language runtimes (static, cc, java, python, nodejs, etc.) across Debian releases and many CPU architectures.

Use cases

  • build minimal docker images for my app
  • reduce container image size and CVE surface
  • run containers without a shell for hardening
  • find a small base image for a Go or Java microservice
  • create nonroot container images for kubernetes
  • improve container scanner signal-to-noise
  • build secure production container images

When to choose

  • you want the smallest, most hardened runtime image for a compiled or interpreted app
  • you run containers in production and want to minimize attack surface and CVE noise
  • you need multi-architecture, regularly updated Debian-based base images
  • you build images with Bazel or can use static binaries

When to avoid

  • you need a shell, package manager, or debugging tools inside the running container (debug tags only partially help)
  • your app depends on distro packages or glibc variants not covered by the provided images
  • you need Alpine musl-based images or non-Debian distros

Facets

infra-config · maturity active

container-runtime security deployment developer-tools security cloud-computing cloud container-images distroless minimal-images bazel debian base-images supply-chain-security containers devops docker linux kubernetes

1 source

Member repositories

RepositoryRoleHealth v2
GoogleContainerTools/distrolessmain77

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="GoogleContainerTools/distroless")

Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem