Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

debootstrap is a very powerful tool that most of debian/ubuntu people already know about.

It’s really super easy to create your own basic debian docker image, even if you are not running debian.

I used the below steps to my archlinux box, but i believe are generic and you can also use them, without any effort.

Step One:

Download and prepare debootstrap

# wget -c http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.77.tar.gz
# tar xf debootstrap_*.tar.gz
# cd debootstrap

# sed -i -e 's#/usr/share/debootstrap#.#' debootstrap

Step Two:

debootstrap a new sid (unstable) debian:

# mkdir sid

# ./debootstrap --arch amd64 --include=aptitude  sid sid/

Step Three:

Just to be safe, extract debian packages with ar

# cd sid

# for i in `ls -1 var/cache/apt/archives/*deb`; do ar p $i data.tar.xz | tar xJ ; done
# for i in `ls -1 var/cache/apt/archives/*deb`; do ar p $i data.tar.gz | tar xz ; done
# rm -rf var/cache/apt/archives/*deb

Step Four:

Prepare your debian unstable directory.
eg. create the sources.list file

# cat > etc/apt/sources.list << EOF
> deb http://ftp.gr.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
> deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ Sid-updates main contrib non-free
> deb http://security.debian.org/ Sid/updates main contrib non-free
> EOF

Step Five:

Dockerized your debian image:

# tar -c . | docker import - debian:sid
cdf6f22b76f23fa95ae2d5858cec4546086a2064b66cf34b937bc87c83f13c91

# docker images
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             VIRTUAL SIZE
debian              sid                 cdf6f22b76f2        5 seconds ago       291.3 MB

You are now ready to play with your new image:

# docker run -t -i --rm debian:sid bash
I have no name!@f3ee67226a07:/#