Coder allows your organization to structure your image hierarchy however you'd like. However, we've seen organizations do well by defining a set of organization-wide base images from which all projects are created.

These base images extend common open-source base images. They also contain security patches, org-wide utilities, and configuration settings/information that individual project images will get by default when you create additional images. For example:

FROM ubuntu:20.04

# Install baseline packages
RUN apt-get update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND="noninteractive" apt-get install -y \
    build-essential \
    git \
    bash \
    curl \
    wget \
    unzip \
    htop \
    man \
    vim \
    sudo \
    python3 \
    python3-pip \
    ca-certificates \
    locales

# Add a user `coder` so that you're not developing as the `root` user
RUN adduser --gecos '' --disabled-password coder && \
  echo "coder ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" >> /etc/sudoers.d/nopasswd
USER coder

Your users can then create descendant images. These contain all of the original tooling and configuration installed onto the base image and the new customizations added by the users.