The LinuxServer.io team brings you another container release featuring:
- regular and timely application updates
- easy user mappings (PGID, PUID)
- custom base image with s6 overlay
- weekly base OS updates with common layers across the entire LinuxServer.io ecosystem to minimise space usage, down time and bandwidth
- regular security updates
Find us at:
- Blog - all the things you can do with our containers including How-To guides, opinions and much more!
- Discord - realtime support / chat with the community and the team.
- Discourse - post on our community forum.
- Fleet - an online web interface which displays all of our maintained images.
- GitHub - view the source for all of our repositories.
- Open Collective - please consider helping us by either donating or contributing to our budget
Kali-linux - is an Advanced Penetration Testing Linux distribution used for Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking and network security assessments. KALI LINUX ™ is a trademark of OffSec.
We utilise the docker manifest for multi-platform awareness. More information is available from docker here and our announcement here.
Simply pulling lscr.io/linuxserver/kali-linux:latest should retrieve the correct image for your arch, but you can also pull specific arch images via tags.
The architectures supported by this image are:
| Architecture | Available | Tag |
|---|---|---|
| x86-64 | âś… | amd64-<version tag> |
| arm64 | âś… | arm64v8-<version tag> |
| armhf | ❌ |
The Kali Linux image can be accessed at:
Modern GUI desktop apps have issues with the latest Docker and syscall compatibility, you can use Docker with the --security-opt seccomp=unconfined setting to allow these syscalls on hosts with older Kernels or libseccomp
Warning
Do not put this on the Internet if you do not know what you are doing.
By default this container has no authentication and the optional environment variables CUSTOM_USER and PASSWORD to enable basic http auth via the embedded NGINX server should only be used to locally secure the container from unwanted access on a local network. If exposing this to the Internet we recommend putting it behind a reverse proxy, such as SWAG, and ensuring a secure authentication solution is in place. From the web interface a terminal can be launched and it is configured for passwordless sudo, so anyone with access to it can install and run whatever they want along with probing your local network.
This container is based on Docker Baseimage KasmVNC which means there are additional environment variables and run configurations to enable or disable specific functionality.
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| CUSTOM_PORT | Internal port the container listens on for http if it needs to be swapped from the default 3000. |
| CUSTOM_HTTPS_PORT | Internal port the container listens on for https if it needs to be swapped from the default 3001. |
| CUSTOM_USER | HTTP Basic auth username, abc is default. |
| PASSWORD | HTTP Basic auth password, abc is default. If unset there will be no auth |
| SUBFOLDER | Subfolder for the application if running a subfolder reverse proxy, need both slashes IE /subfolder/ |
| TITLE | The page title displayed on the web browser, default "KasmVNC Client". |
| FM_HOME | This is the home directory (landing) for the file manager, default "/config". |
| START_DOCKER | If set to false a container with privilege will not automatically start the DinD Docker setup. |
| DRINODE | If mounting in /dev/dri for DRI3 GPU Acceleration allows you to specify the device to use IE /dev/dri/renderD128 |
| DISABLE_IPV6 | If set to true or any value this will disable IPv6 |
| LC_ALL | Set the Language for the container to run as IE fr_FR.UTF-8 ar_AE.UTF-8 |
| NO_DECOR | If set the application will run without window borders in openbox for use as a PWA. |
| NO_FULL | Do not autmatically fullscreen applications when using openbox. |
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
--privileged |
Will start a Docker in Docker (DinD) setup inside the container to use docker in an isolated environment. For increased performance mount the Docker directory inside the container to the host IE -v /home/user/docker-data:/var/lib/docker. |
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock |
Mount in the host level Docker socket to either interact with it via CLI or use Docker enabled applications. |
--device /dev/dri:/dev/dri |
Mount a GPU into the container, this can be used in conjunction with the DRINODE environment variable to leverage a host video card for GPU accelerated applications. Only Open Source drivers are supported IE (Intel,AMDGPU,Radeon,ATI,Nouveau) |
The environment variable LC_ALL can be used to start this container in a different language than English simply pass for example to launch the Desktop session in French LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8. Some languages like Chinese, Japanese, or Korean will be missing fonts needed to render properly known as cjk fonts, but others may exist and not be installed inside the container depending on what underlying distribution you are running. We only ensure fonts for Latin characters are present. Fonts can be installed with a mod on startup.
To install cjk fonts on startup as an example pass the environment variables (Alpine base):
-e DOCKER_MODS=linuxserver/mods:universal-package-install
-e INSTALL_PACKAGES=fonts-noto-cjk-e LC_ALL=zh_CN.UTF-8
The web interface has the option for "IME Input Mode" in Settings which will allow non english characters to be used from a non en_US keyboard on the client. Once enabled it will perform the same as a local Linux installation set to your locale.
For accelerated apps or games, render devices can be mounted into the container and leveraged by applications using:
--device /dev/dri:/dev/dri
This feature only supports Open Source GPU drivers:
| Driver | Description |
|---|---|
| Intel | i965 and i915 drivers for Intel iGPU chipsets |
| AMD | AMDGPU, Radeon, and ATI drivers for AMD dedicated or APU chipsets |
| NVIDIA | nouveau2 drivers only, closed source NVIDIA drivers lack DRI3 support |
The DRINODE environment variable can be used to point to a specific GPU.
Up to date information can be found here
Nvidia support is not compatible with Alpine based images as Alpine lacks Nvidia drivers
Nvidia support is available by leveraging Zink for OpenGL support. This can be enabled with the following run flags:
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| --gpus all | This can be filtered down but for most setups this will pass the one Nvidia GPU on the system |
| --runtime nvidia | Specify the Nvidia runtime which mounts drivers and tools in from the host |
The compose syntax is slightly different for this as you will need to set nvidia as the default runtime:
sudo nvidia-ctk runtime configure --runtime=docker --set-as-default
sudo service docker restart
And to assign the GPU in compose:
services:
kali-linux:
image: lscr.io/linuxserver/kali-linux:latest
deploy:
resources:
reservations:
devices:
- driver: nvidia
count: 1
capabilities: [compute,video,graphics,utility]
If you run system native installations of software IE sudo apt-get install filezilla and then upgrade or destroy/re-create the container that software will be removed and the container will be at a clean state. For some users that will be acceptable and they can update their system packages as well using system native commands like apt-get upgrade. If you want Docker to handle upgrading the container and retain your applications and settings we have created proot-apps which allow portable applications to be installed to persistent storage in the user's $HOME directory and they will work in a confined Docker environment out of the box. These applications and their settings will persist upgrades of the base container and can be mounted into different flavors of KasmVNC based containers on the fly. This can be achieved from the command line with:
proot-apps install filezilla
PRoot Apps is included in all KasmVNC based containers, a list of linuxserver.io supported applications is located HERE.
It is possible to install extra packages during container start using universal-package-install. It might increase starting time significantly. PRoot is preferred.
environment:
- DOCKER_MODS=linuxserver/mods:universal-package-install
- INSTALL_PACKAGES=libfuse2|git|gdbThis container is capable of delivering a true lossless image at a high framerate to your web browser by changing the Stream Quality preset to "Lossless", more information here. In order to use this mode from a non localhost endpoint the HTTPS port on 3001 needs to be used. If using a reverse proxy to port 3000 specific headers will need to be set as outlined here.
To help you get started creating a container from this image you can either use docker-compose or the docker cli.
docker-compose (recommended, click here for more info)
---
services:
kali-linux:
image: lscr.io/linuxserver/kali-linux:latest
container_name: kali-linux
security_opt:
- seccomp:unconfined #optional
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=Etc/UTC
- SUBFOLDER=/ #optional
- "TITLE=Kali Linux" #optional
volumes:
- /path/to/data:/config
- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock #optional
ports:
- 3000:3000
- 3001:3001
devices:
- /dev/dri:/dev/dri #optional
shm_size: "1gb" #optional
restart: unless-stoppeddocker cli (click here for more info)
docker run -d \
--name=kali-linux \
--security-opt seccomp=unconfined `#optional` \
-e PUID=1000 \
-e PGID=1000 \
-e TZ=Etc/UTC \
-e SUBFOLDER=/ `#optional` \
-e TITLE="Kali Linux" `#optional` \
-p 3000:3000 \
-p 3001:3001 \
-v /path/to/data:/config \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock `#optional` \
--device /dev/dri:/dev/dri `#optional` \
--shm-size="1gb" `#optional` \
--restart unless-stopped \
lscr.io/linuxserver/kali-linux:latestContainers are configured using parameters passed at runtime (such as those above). These parameters are separated by a colon and indicate <external>:<internal> respectively. For example, -p 8080:80 would expose port 80 from inside the container to be accessible from the host's IP on port 8080 outside the container.
| Parameter | Function |
|---|---|
-p 3000 |
Web Desktop GUI |
-p 3001 |
Web Desktop GUI HTTPS |
-e PUID=1000 |
for UserID - see below for explanation |
-e PGID=1000 |
for GroupID - see below for explanation |
-e TZ=Etc/UTC |
specify a timezone to use, see this list. |
-e SUBFOLDER=/ |
Specify a subfolder to use with reverse proxies, IE /subfolder/ |
-e TITLE=Kali Linux |
String which will be used as page/tab title in the web browser. |
-v /config |
abc users home directory |
-v /var/run/docker.sock |
Docker Socket on the system, if you want to use Docker in the container |
--device /dev/dri |
Add this for GL support (Linux hosts only) |
--shm-size= |
We set this to 1 gig to prevent modern web browsers from crashing |
--security-opt seccomp=unconfined |
For Docker Engine only, many modern gui apps need this to function on older hosts as syscalls are unknown to Docker. |
You can set any environment variable from a file by using a special prepend FILE__.
As an example:
-e FILE__MYVAR=/run/secrets/mysecretvariableWill set the environment variable MYVAR based on the contents of the /run/secrets/mysecretvariable file.
For all of our images we provide the ability to override the default umask settings for services started within the containers using the optional -e UMASK=022 setting.
Keep in mind umask is not chmod it subtracts from permissions based on it's value it does not add. Please read up here before asking for support.
When using volumes (-v flags), permissions issues can arise between the host OS and the container, we avoid this issue by allowing you to specify the user PUID and group PGID.
Ensure any volume directories on the host are owned by the same user you specify and any permissions issues will vanish like magic.
In this instance PUID=1000 and PGID=1000, to find yours use id your_user as below:
id your_userExample output:
uid=1000(your_user) gid=1000(your_user) groups=1000(your_user)
We publish various Docker Mods to enable additional functionality within the containers. The list of Mods available for this image (if any) as well as universal mods that can be applied to any one of our images can be accessed via the dynamic badges above.
-
Shell access whilst the container is running:
docker exec -it kali-linux /bin/bash -
To monitor the logs of the container in realtime:
docker logs -f kali-linux
-
Container version number:
docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "build_version" }}' kali-linux -
Image version number:
docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "build_version" }}' lscr.io/linuxserver/kali-linux:latest
Most of our images are static, versioned, and require an image update and container recreation to update the app inside. With some exceptions (noted in the relevant readme.md), we do not recommend or support updating apps inside the container. Please consult the Application Setup section above to see if it is recommended for the image.
Below are the instructions for updating containers:
-
Update images:
-
All images:
docker-compose pull
-
Single image:
docker-compose pull kali-linux
-
-
Update containers:
-
All containers:
docker-compose up -d
-
Single container:
docker-compose up -d kali-linux
-
-
You can also remove the old dangling images:
docker image prune
-
Update the image:
docker pull lscr.io/linuxserver/kali-linux:latest
-
Stop the running container:
docker stop kali-linux
-
Delete the container:
docker rm kali-linux
-
Recreate a new container with the same docker run parameters as instructed above (if mapped correctly to a host folder, your
/configfolder and settings will be preserved) -
You can also remove the old dangling images:
docker image prune
Tip
We recommend Diun for update notifications. Other tools that automatically update containers unattended are not recommended or supported.
If you want to make local modifications to these images for development purposes or just to customize the logic:
git clone https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-kali-linux.git
cd docker-kali-linux
docker build \
--no-cache \
--pull \
-t lscr.io/linuxserver/kali-linux:latest .The ARM variants can be built on x86_64 hardware and vice versa using lscr.io/linuxserver/qemu-static
docker run --rm --privileged lscr.io/linuxserver/qemu-static --resetOnce registered you can define the dockerfile to use with -f Dockerfile.aarch64.
- 18.07.24: - Initial release.
