.NET Container images: whoami

We have had two relevant practices for the container images we publish:

• Don't change the user.
• Don't add users.

You can see that with our .NET 7 container images.

$ docker run --rm debian:bullseye-slim whoami
root
$ docker run --rm mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:7.0-bullseye-slim whoami
root
$ docker run --rm debian:bullseye-slim cat /etc/passwd | wc -l
19
$ docker run --rm mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:7.0-bullseye-slim cat /etc/passwd | wc -l
19

The images are identical with respect to users. The 7.0 tag is identical to 7.0-bullseye-slim (for Linux images).

Note: users are stored in the /etc/passwd file on Linux, one per line. wc -l provides a line count, giving us the number of users.

Starting with .NET 8, we've added a non-root user, app. That removes the second of the two practices, going forward. We've also switched to using Debian Bookworm.

$ docker run --rm debian:bookworm-slim whoami
root
$ docker run --rm mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:8.0-preview-bookworm-slim whoami
root
$ docker run --rm debian:bookworm-slim cat /etc/passwd | wc -l
18
$ docker run --rm mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:8.0-preview-bookworm-slim cat /etc/passwd | wc -l
19
$ docker run --rm mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:8.0-preview-bookworm-slim cat /etc/passwd | tail -n 1
app:x:64198:64198::/home/app:/bin/sh

Our user gets added as the last line in the file, which explains the use of tail -n 1.

We see some differences now. First, both images continue to use the root user. The .NET image adds an app user. Debian removed a user (gnats) that was in Bullseye, which explains the differing user count across the two Debian versions, although that's irrelevant to our topic.

We can try whoami with the app user.

$ docker run --rm -u app mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:8.0-preview-bookworm-slim whoami
app

That works.

This user is available in all .NET Linux images. It is added as part our runtime-deps layer.

$ docker run --rm -u app mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/runtime-deps:8.0-preview-bookworm-slim whoami
app

It is also available in our Alpine and Ubuntu images:

$ docker run --rm -u app mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/runtime-deps:8.0-preview-alpine whoami
app
$ docker run --rm -u app mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/runtime-deps:8.0-preview-jammy whoami
app