Hi. We've already talked about this internally and yes, I think we agree it would be beneficial to supply/distribute a Raspberry Pi container image, certainly a minimal 'zero' image constructed specifically for container use, and which has apt mirrors pre-configured. This would would enable download/install of Debian and RPi packages out of the box.
I have the crux of this working today in a local experimental rpi-image-gen (https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-image-gen) branch which can build the container image from scratch. It's basically a trimmed down Debian minbase plus pre-configured apt mirrors for both Debian and RPi, plus raspberrypi-archive-keyring installed plus apt and dpkg tweaks. Compressed it's ~ 30MiB. This image makes it possible to, for example, build a bootable disk image using pi-gen-micro (https://github.com/raspberrypi/pi-gen-micro/) - which only runs on Trixie - on a Bookworm system. The zero container can be launched (I use podman, but as the image is OCI compatible other engines such as docker work just fine) and the pi-gen-micro build run within it. As the image has apt mirrors pre-configured, download/install of RPi deb packages such as rpi-make-boot-image and raspberrypi-archive-keyring just work.
Regarding "official Docker image for Raspberry Pi OS", I don't know how much value there would be in a Lite or Desktop container image of Raspberry Pi OS. The use-case described above is definitely a void that would be nice to fill, but I don't know if the same applies to much heavier-weight images, which would be much larger. Realistically, I'm not sure how useful they would be?
I have the crux of this working today in a local experimental rpi-image-gen (https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-image-gen) branch which can build the container image from scratch. It's basically a trimmed down Debian minbase plus pre-configured apt mirrors for both Debian and RPi, plus raspberrypi-archive-keyring installed plus apt and dpkg tweaks. Compressed it's ~ 30MiB. This image makes it possible to, for example, build a bootable disk image using pi-gen-micro (https://github.com/raspberrypi/pi-gen-micro/) - which only runs on Trixie - on a Bookworm system. The zero container can be launched (I use podman, but as the image is OCI compatible other engines such as docker work just fine) and the pi-gen-micro build run within it. As the image has apt mirrors pre-configured, download/install of RPi deb packages such as rpi-make-boot-image and raspberrypi-archive-keyring just work.
Regarding "official Docker image for Raspberry Pi OS", I don't know how much value there would be in a Lite or Desktop container image of Raspberry Pi OS. The use-case described above is definitely a void that would be nice to fill, but I don't know if the same applies to much heavier-weight images, which would be much larger. Realistically, I'm not sure how useful they would be?
Statistics: Posted by learmj — Wed Feb 18, 2026 4:01 pm