Official Images
What ships in Tektona's official sandbox images — sandbox-base and desktop-x11 — and how to extend them.
Tektona publishes two official sandbox images on GitHub Container Registry.
Both are built on Ubuntu 24.04 and boot with systemd, so a sandbox
behaves like a regular Linux machine: apt install nginx starts and enables
the service, systemctl works, and background daemons keep running
(requires image 0.4.3 or later).
sandbox-base
ghcr.io/tektona-ai/sandbox-base
is the headless image — pick it for agent, CI-style, or server workloads
that don't need a screen. It ships:
- AI coding agents: Claude Code, Codex, and opencode, ready on the
PATH(each release bundles the latest stable versions). - Node.js 22 LTS with npm.
- code-server for VS Code in the browser.
- A developer toolchain: git (with LFS), Python 3 with pip, build-essential, cmake, and the usual command-line tools for building, inspecting, and debugging (curl, jq, yq, rsync, htop, strace, and more).
- The
tektonauser with passwordless sudo; sessions land in/home/tektona.
desktop-x11
ghcr.io/tektona-ai/desktop-x11
is sandbox-base plus a full X11 desktop, and the recommended starting point
for VNC and computer use. On top of
everything above it adds:
- A lightweight desktop environment (Openbox window manager with a dock), viewable in the browser or any VNC client.
- Google Chrome, preconfigured to run inside the sandbox with no first-run prompts — ready for AI browser automation.
- Desktop apps: a terminal, file manager, text editors, calculator, PDF viewer, and LibreOffice Writer and Calc.
- The tooling behind
tektonactl desktop— screenshots, clicking, typing, window management, and screen recording.
tektona sandbox create --image ghcr.io/tektona-ai/desktop-x11:0.4.3 --vncVersions
Images are versioned together and tagged X.Y.Z (plus a floating X.Y).
Browse published versions on the package pages linked above and use the
highest-numbered tag. Image references must be deterministic — see
Choosing an image for the
pinning rules.
Extending
Both images are ordinary OCI images — extend them with a Dockerfile and boot the result like any other image:
FROM ghcr.io/tektona-ai/desktop-x11:0.4.3
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y your-toolsSee Run a Custom Image for pushing and using your own image, including private registries.