CentOS 8 Stream Docker image

We’re all divided with recent decision to focus on CentOS Stream, which essentially means that stable, professional distro will turn into rolling release now. Also CentOS board members don’t gave us more confidence for the future.

I don’t want to be totally sceptic, I would like to test it on my own and only then, decide if it’s stable enough. But I work mostly with Docker containers and there are no official Docker images with Stream variant. I decided to create it on my own, based on official instruction.

Images after a switch were twice times bigger than basic centos:8, so I used old school way to squash them:

docker run --name tgagor-centos-stream tgagor/centos-stream true
docker export tgagor-centos-stream | docker import - tgagor/centos-stream:squashed
docker rm tgagor-centos-stream

This way I’m receiving just single layer with final packages and configuration. Result was pretty impressive:

REPOSITORY             VARIANT    SIZE
centos                 8          209MB
tgagor/centos-stream   latest     455MB
tgagor/centos-stream   squashed   297MB

New image is are still bigger (because upgrade install additional dependencies), but it’s acceptable. I also used Docker Hub’s hooks to customize build. Thanks to that, when you fetch image from registry, it will be already squashed ;)

Now at least I can try it and decide on my own, if it’s stable enough for production workloads.

Where can you get it?

You can fetch docker image here:

• tgagor/centos-stream
• ghcr.io/tgagor/centos-stream