It’s basically just a fancy bash script (mkimage.sh) and Makefiles for calling scripts with different sets of paramaters. The process – is the same exact process of creating base docker images – chroot and using package manager apt or yum to install packages in chroot jails. That is how ubi9 or debian slim base images are made. With this tool you can extend the process – install dependencies, run security checks, sign it all in one go. It’s easy to extend it, so you can create base images for Kafka with different Java distributions for example. Which is very useful for testing and performance tuning.

Imagine you work at a large org and you want to control all images used for CI/CD workers. Instead of scattering it across different Dockerfiles and scripts (Java, NodeJS, python, etc) you can just use a single tool. At least it was why I built it in the first place.