Simon Krenger

Back in May 2026, Red Hat released Red Hat Hardened Images, which are distroless images for various languages and runtimes. The repository used to build these images is https://gitlab.com/redhat/hummingbird/containers and I think these are great base images if you are looking for a more minimal or hardened setup.

Given the nature of these distroless images, there is obviously no shell included in the container image, which makes debugging harder. This means when trying to debug such an image using oc rsh or similar, this will fail with an error message:

$ oc create deployment apache --image=registry.access.redhat.com/hi/httpd:latest
$ oc get po
NAME                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
apache-6bc857d844-qmxcr   1/1     Running   0          65s

$ oc rsh apache-6bc857d844-qmxcr 
2026-07-08T19:27:02.257947Z: executable file `/bin/sh` not found: No such file or directory
command terminated with exit code 1

For a proof-of-concept, I had to install a new Mantis Bug Tracker instance and after finishing the installation, the login screen greeted me with the following warning:

SYSTEM WARNING: date_default_timezone_get(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'UTC' for 'UTC/0.0/no DST' instead

The solution is amazingly simple. The only thing that I needed to find out was that this is a PHP error and not a MantisBT error. So after that was settled, I went on and just followed the instructions given by the warning: