In the download section are the different container image variants Base, Minimal, UBI and Toolbox.
What are the differences? I might have “tomatos on my eyes”, but I could not find any conclusive answer in the docs.
The primary difference between the four are the package sets, which ultimately affect their size and what they can do out of the box.
Base will contain a starting base of packages and then includes packages such as dnf, vim-minimal, tar, and a few other utilities.
Minimal will contain a very small starting base of packages, but goes further by stripping out utilities and unneeded packages. Package management is still available with microdnf rather than dnf itself. This is the smallest image we provide for those conscious about footprint. I gather a lot of folks like and prefer this image because of that.
UBI is meant to be similar to Red Hat’s UBI image. It’s like the Base image, but a few more bells and whistles like systemd being available. UBI stands for “universal base image” and is essentially for kubernetes based workloads (not that you have to use a UBI image for that, you can use the UBI image for anything you’d like).
Toolbox is a much bigger image and is meant to be used with the toolbox package/command on Fedora or Enterprise Linux systems. The toolbox command is a wrapper around podman and simply places you into a container with a shell. It contains a chunk of the standard utilities and package set you may find if you did a minimal install of Rocky Linux. It can be used for development or even experimentation. (I personally use toolbox for testing changes in Rocky Linux development without spinning up a whole VM)
This may not be super helpful, but this file describes the package set that is installed for each container that we provide.
Hopefully this helps.
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Thanks. It does help. Exactly what I was after.