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.

Coder assets

Coder inserts static assets into each workspace, including:

• code-server
• JetBrains Projector
• Coder CLI, which includes the Coder Agent

These assets are installed into the /var/tmp/coder directory of each workspace. You do not need to include these static assets in your custom images. However, the following software are required when you build custom images:

• POSIX Utilities
• GNU libc
  • The minimum GNU libc version supported for the Coder-inserted assets is 2.1
  • Coder doesn't support Alpine, since it uses musl libc
• GNU Core Utilities

The following utilities are optional:

• ssh-agent to automatically add the Coder user's public SSH key to the agent
• systemd for service supervision (this is only available with CVMs
• OpenSSH server
  • You can run OpenSSH from either your coder/configure script or systemd