Container of the Week – scratch

There’s literally not much to say about the scratch container as it’s completely empty! This container is usually only used when creating a base container from an external root filesystem in combination with the ADD command.

A Dockerfile that does this would look like:

FROM scratch
ADD rootfs.tar /

The root filesystem can be created outside of Docker or downloaded from a third party.  For example when creating a base container using Debian the root filesystem can be created with debootstrap. The ADD command takes the tarball and extracts it into the container.

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