Custom Assembly Resources on

Overview of Chainguard Custom Assembly

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:07:52 +0200

Chainguard Custom Assembly enables organizations to build container images tailored to their internal requirements and application dependencies, without sacrificing security. By extending Chainguard’s hardened base images with additional packages, environment variables, user accounts, and certificates, teams can reduce CVE exposure while maintaining the flexibility their workflows demand.

This overview of Custom Assembly outlines how it works, its limitations, and how you can use container images customized with Custom Assembly. For a more hands-on tutorial on using Custom Assembly, Chainguard Academy currently has documentation for the following methods of managing the tool:

Custom Assembly FAQs

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:07:52 +0200

What is Chainguard’s Custom Assembly?

Custom Assembly is a tool from Chainguard that allows users to build customized container images by assembling packages from a curated, secure set of base images provided by Chainguard.

Using the Chainguard Console to Manage Custom Assembly Resources

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 11:07:52 +0200

Chainguard’s Custom Assembly feature allows you to build customized container images that include only the packages your application needs. This tutorial will walk you through using the Chainguard console’s web interface to manage Custom Assembly resources, including selecting packages, building customized containers, and monitoring build status.

By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to create, customize, and manage your own container images through the Chainguard console, giving you full control over your container dependencies while maintaining Chainguard’s security and compliance standards.

Using chainctl to Manage Custom Assembly Resources

Thu, 01 May 2025 11:07:52 +0200

Chainguard’s Custom Assembly is a tool that allows customers to create customized containers with extra packages and annotations added. This enables customers to reduce their risk exposure by creating container images that are tailored to their internal organization and application requirements while still having few-to-zero CVEs.

You can use chainctl, Chainguard’s command-line interface tool, to further customize your Custom Assembly builds and retrieve information about them. This guide provides an overview of the relevant chainctl commands and outlines how you can edit the configuration of Custom Assembly containers, as well as retrieve a list of a customized image’s builds and its build logs.

Using GitOps to Manage Custom Assembly Resources

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:07:52 +0200

Chainguard’s Custom Assembly is a tool that allows customers to create customized container images with extra packages and annotations added. This enables customers to reduce their risk exposure by creating container images that are tailored to their internal organization and application requirements while still having few-to-zero CVEs. It can be managed in the Chainguard Console, with chainctl, with the API, or via CI/CD.

This guide shows how to use Chainguard Custom Assembly as code via CI/CD, storing your configuration in Git and using automation to apply changes and trigger builds. The examples in this guide focus on GitHub Actions, as seen in Chainguard’s custom-assembly-as-code demo repository.

Using the Chainguard API to Manage Custom Assembly Resources

Thu, 01 May 2025 11:07:52 +0200

Chainguard’s Custom Assembly is a tool that allows customers to create customized containers with extra packages added. This enables customers to reduce their risk exposure by creating container images that are tailored to their internal organization and application requirements while still having few-to-zero CVEs.

You can use the Chainguard API to further customize your Custom Assembly builds and retrieve information about them. This tutorial highlights a demo application (which can be found in Chainguard Academy’s Demo Applications repository) which, when run, updates a Custom Assembly container’s configuration based on a provided YAML file.

Adding Custom Certificates with Custom Assembly

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:07:52 +0200

Many enterprise environments use internal certificate authorities (CAs) to issue certificates for internal services. These custom certificates need to be trusted by containers that communicate with the internal services. Custom Assembly allows you to build custom certificates directly into your container images, ensuring they trust your organization’s internal services without requiring manual certificate mounting at runtime.

Note: If you are looking for a way to embed certificates at build time, refer to our guide on How To Use incert to Create Container Images with Built-in Custom Certificates.