keto

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for keto

Ory Keto is a scalable, Zanzibar-inspired permission server supporting ACL, RBAC, and relationship-based access control.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/keto:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Chainguard Keto image is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the official oryd/keto image. Like upstream, the entrypoint is keto and the default command is serve.

Like upstream, the image runs as the non-root ory user (UID 100, GID 101) with home directory /home/ory. It contains only the minimum dependencies required to run Keto and does not include a shell or package manager. Keto is built with Go from upstream release v26.2.0 with SQLite support enabled, and is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Getting Started

Verify the image with a version check:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/keto:latest version

Create a minimal configuration file that uses an in-memory database:

dsn: memory
namespaces:
  - id: 0
    name: files
serve:
  read:
    host: 0.0.0.0
    port: 4466
  write:
    host: 0.0.0.0
    port: 4467

Run Keto with the read and write APIs published:

docker run --rm \
  -p 4466:4466 -p 4467:4467 \
  -v "$PWD/keto.yaml:/etc/config/keto.yaml" \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/keto:latest serve --config /etc/config/keto.yaml

Check that the APIs are healthy:

curl http://127.0.0.1:4466/health/ready
curl http://127.0.0.1:4467/health/alive

Keto reads its configuration from $HOME/keto.yml by default. The image does not ship that file, so always mount a configuration file and pass it with --config.

For a SQL-backed deployment, run migrations before starting the server:

docker run --rm \
  -v "$PWD/keto.yaml:/etc/config/keto.yaml" \
  -e DSN="postgres://keto:secret@postgres:5432/keto?sslmode=disable" \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/keto:latest migrate up --yes --config /etc/config/keto.yaml

Helm Chart Installation

The image works with the official Ory Keto Helm chart:

helm repo add ory https://k8s.ory.sh/helm/charts
helm repo update
helm install keto ory/keto \
  --set image.registry=cgr.dev \
  --set image.repository=ORGANIZATION/keto \
  --set image.tag=latest

The chart renders the image as <image.registry>/<image.repository>:<image.tag> and defaults image.registry to docker.io, so set the registry and repository separately. The chart's default DSN is memory.

Configuration

Keto is configured through a YAML file (passed with --config), environment variables such as DSN, or command-line flags. Supported databases are PostgreSQL, MySQL, CockroachDB, and SQLite.

Exposed ports (as configured by Keto by default):

• 4466: read API (check, expand, list)
• 4467: write API (create and delete relation tuples)
• 4468: metrics

The /var/lib/sqlite directory is writable by the ory user and can be used for a file-backed SQLite database. Any volume you mount there, or elsewhere for persistent data, must be writable by UID 100.

Documentation and Resources

• Ory Keto Documentation
• Keto Quickstart Guide
• Ory Keto GitHub Repository
• Ory Helm Charts

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.