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