Distroless Images
The English user guide is currently in beta preview. Most of the documents have been automatically translated from the Japanese version. Should you find any inaccuracies, please reach out to Flatt Security.
Takumi Images production images contain only the program to run and the runtime dependencies needed by that program. They do not include a shell, package manager, or general-purpose command set for file operations or networking. Images without general-purpose distribution tooling are called distroless. Takumi Images are built with Nix and include only what the program needs to run, such as CA certificates and time-zone data.
Benefits
The main benefit of a distroless image is that it reduces the number of components that could contain vulnerabilities. You can see the difference by inspecting the actual contents. For example, exporting the busybox image and listing the included Nix store paths shows only the following entries.
$ crane export --platform linux/amd64 images.flatt.tech/takumi/busybox:latest - \
| tar -t | grep -oE 'nix/store/[^/]+' | sort -u
nix/store/58pi7dmvz599jk7dypk2hw4mzvfjlvq3-group
nix/store/68q98vvgh88dxan3pglapfwzakz4r99j-nss-cacert-3.123
nix/store/8kvxvr3pmsypxiypq4g8zy13glnfr7nx-glibc-2.42-67
nix/store/aasbksznz37vw5pb26wq86209q5cmza8-xgcc-15.2.0-libgcc
nix/store/cdww1f1p7r6xqwfsxr74dh5a6213c3xb-passwd
nix/store/ipz4lbivx3q7gr79130d6g5ix35vibnw-libunistring-1.4.2
nix/store/n7vzh8day7g32l5j9pfn1yckw4p24qks-nsswitch.conf
nix/store/nw13piwy5s713rg78h0js432rwz4d247-takumi-busybox-path
nix/store/xpp0j7j90g2nbr382bi2ym0ln9ykli6l-busybox-1.37.0
nix/store/zlvydh6q1rv1jza79b21yhi07ic0dkkg-libidn2-2.3.8
The software components are busybox itself, glibc and its GCC runtime (xgcc-libgcc), libidn2, libunistring, and CA certificates (nss-cacert).
The remaining entries are configuration files such as passwd.
The same list is also available from the image's SBOM.
For comparison, the general-purpose debian:stable base image contains 78 installed packages as of July 2026.
$ docker run --rm debian:stable sh -c "dpkg -l | grep -c '^ii'"
78
Those packages include a shell, package manager (apt), Perl, and other components many workloads do not need at runtime.
They increase the number of things vulnerability scanners can report, and users must triage which findings matter to their workload.
Takumi Images production images include only what the running program needs, so a larger share of scanner findings are likely to be findings that actually need attention.
Distroless images also reduce the attack surface.
Even if an attacker can execute code inside the container, common next-step tools such as sh or curl are not present.
This does not prevent compromise by itself, but it can limit what an attacker can do after compromise, making the image a better fit as a production base.