Liberty container images
WebSphere® Liberty and Open Liberty offer a collection of preconfigured container images that provide different options for Java™ versions and distribution, feature set, and runtime versions. You can use a container image to build and run your containerized applications.
The preconfigured container images contain an International License Agreement for Non-Warranted Programs (ILAN) license. The license allows entitled Liberty customers to use the images under an International Program License Agreement (IPLA) term.
- WebSphere Liberty container images on IBM Container Registry
- Open Liberty container images on IBM Container Registry
- Container image naming conventions
For more information about using container images to build an application image, see Creating container application images.
WebSphere Liberty container images on IBM Container Registry
Preconfigured WebSphere Liberty container
images use the Red Hat Universal Base Image as the operating system and are
available from the IBM Container Registry (ICR). WebSphere Liberty container
images are available in ICR at icr.io/appcafe/websphere-liberty
. You can append a
WebSphere Liberty container image tag to specify the details of the container image that you want to
pull from ICR. For example;
icr.io/appcafe/websphere-liberty:kernel-java21-openj9-ubi-minimal
Select from the following container image tags for the latest WebSphere Liberty release from ICR.
kernel-java21-openj9-ubi-minimal
kernel-java17-openj9-ubi
kernel-java11-openj9-ubi
kernel-java8-openj9-ubi
kernel-java8-ibmjava-ubi
full-java21-openj9-ubi-minimal
full-java17-openj9-ubi
full-java11-openj9-ubi
full-java8-openj9-ubi
full-java8-ibmjava-ubi
latest
These tags pull the latest version because they do not specify a version number. You can specify a version other than the latest version in the image tag. For information about values in container image tags, see Container image naming conventions.
ibmcloud login
ibmcloud cr region-set global
ibmcloud cr images --restrict appcafe/websphere-liberty
Authentication is required only
to list the images. You can pull images from ICR without authentication.When you use the IBM
Cloud CLI to list the images in ICR, you might see container image tags that include
platform-specific information at the end of the tag, for example
kernel-java11-openj9-ubi-amd64
. These tags are not intended for use in
FROM
directives in your Dockerfile. Select from the tags that end in
ubi
.
Open Liberty container images on IBM Container Registry
Like the WebSphere Liberty container images on ICR, the Open Liberty images are RHEL-based and certified by both IBM® and Red Hat®. These repositories contain two sets of versioned tags that correspond to the last two quarterly boundary images, such as 23.0.0.12 or 23.0.0.9. Each repository also contains a set of version-less tags that corresponds to the most recent fix pack. See the IBM Container Registry (ICR) page on the Open Liberty GitHub repository for the current list of available Open Liberty container images.
For information about Open Liberty container images and the values in the image tags, see Open Liberty container images on the Open Liberty website.
Container image naming conventions
latest
tag, Liberty container image tags use the
following naming
convention.<optional fix pack version-><liberty image type>-<java version>-<java type>-<base image type>
If you specify any image tag without including a version number, the latest version of WebSphere Liberty is included in the container image
that you pull. In addition to the latest version, full
and kernel
images for the two most recent quarterly releases are always available in ICR and are refreshed
regularly.
The following tag values determine the resources that are included in a container image.
In addition to the tags that follow this naming convention, WebSphere Liberty offers a preformatted
latest
tag that simplifies pulling the full latest release with Java JRE. It is an alias for the
full-java21-openj9-ubi-minimal
tag. If you do not specify a tag value,
latest
is used by default.