concept official image in category docker

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches. Login to get full access to this book.

Official images are something different--they’re usually open source projects, maintained jointly by the project team and Docker. They’re security scanned and regularly updated, and they conform to Dockerfile best practices. All the content for the official images is open source, so you can see the Dockerfiles on GitHub. Most people start using official images as the base for their own images but at some point find they need more control. Then they introduce their own preferred base images, called golden images--figure 5.9 shows you how it works.

Figure 5.9 Using a golden image to encapsulate an official image

Golden images use an official image as the base and then add in whatever custom setup they need, such as installing security certificates or configuring default environment settings. The golden image lives in the company’s repositories on Docker Hub or in their own registry, and all application images are based on the golden image. This approach offers the benefits of the official image--with the best-practice setup by the project team--but with the extra config you need.