This repository contains the base container images for Amazon Linux on Docker Hub and Amazon Elastic Container Registry.

This is more of an artifact store than a Git repository, for reasons explained later. Please note that branches other than master are regularly force-pushed, and content may disappear without warning. For more reliable sources of Amazon Linux container images, use the Amazon Linux on-premises image download site, Docker Hub, and Amazon ECR.

The Docker Official Images program produces the top-level images available on Docker Hub, including the base OS images that serve as a starting point for most Docker users.

The images are maintained in the open. Image generation starts from a file in docker-library/official-images.git named library/amazonlinux. This file is machine-readable and connects image tags to a Git repository and commit.

During image build, the build system clones the referenced Git repository at a given commit and runs docker build in that directory. For application images, this usually involves downloading and installing software. For base OS images, this means adding the contents of a tarball as a single layer:

FROM scratch
ADD amzn2-container-raw-2.0.yyyymmdd-x86_64.tar.xz /
CMD ["/bin/bash"]

Committed alongside the Dockerfile is the tarball, which balloons the repository size. Thus, we force-push branches that contain the tarballs.

Although we force-push the files away, the older versions of our images remain present on Docker Hub and Amazon ECR.

We use a script to generate the other branches of this repository.