alganet/shell-versions

Multiple versions of multiple shells. Ideal for testing portable shell scripts.

Images

• latest - Contains the two most recent versions of each shell. Ideal for testing up to date scripts.
• all - Everything we can build in a single image. Ideal for testing legacy and backwards compatible scripts.

Shells are built on debian-slim, and copied during multi-stage to a barebones busybox image (you get busybox tools + all shells).

Both images are multi-arch manifest lists covering linux/amd64 and linux/arm64, so docker pull selects the right architecture automatically — on Apple Silicon macOS you get native arm64 binaries with no Rosetta/QEMU emulation. The same <shell>_<version> set is published for every architecture.

Every individual shell is published as its own multi-arch tag too, so you can pull a single shell instead of the whole image and still get your native arch:

$ docker pull alganet/shell-versions:bash_5.3.9

Basic Usage

List all shells:

$ docker run -it --rm alganet/shell-versions

Run a shell individually:

$ docker run -it --rm alganet/shell-versions /opt/bash_5.3/bin/bash -c 'echo Hello World'

Advanced Usage

shell-versions docker entrypoint provides helpers to perform tasks on several shells at once. The --help option shows some examples:

$ docker run -it --rm alganet/shell-versions --help
Usage: entrypoint.sh [--match <shell-name>] [--compare <reference-shell>] <commands>

Examples:
  # List all shells
    entrypoint.sh
  # Run a command in all shells matching 'ash*'
    entrypoint.sh --match 'ash*' -c 'echo Hello World'
  # Compare output of a command against a reference shell
    entrypoint.sh --compare '/opt/bash_5.3/bin/bash' -c 'echo ${BASH_VERSION:-}'

Using a Custom List

You can select which shells will be used by the entrypoint by overriding the /opt/shvr/manifest.txt file inside the container. By default, the file contains all the shells built.

First, create a manifest.txt file locally, containing the paths you want:

/opt/bash_5.3/bin/bash
/opt/ash_1.37.0/bin/ash

Then, mount it and run it:

$ docker run -it --rm -v${PWD}/manifest.txt:/opt/shvr/manifest.txt alganet/shell-versions
# /opt/bash_5.3/bin/bash
# /opt/ash_1.37.0/bin/ash

Any options you use (--match, --compare, etc) will be then applicable only to the shells you selected.

Building Locally

You can build shell-versions locally.

$ sh shvr.sh download $(sh shvr.sh targets)
$ docker build -t "mymultishell" --build-arg TARGETS="$(sh shvr.sh targets)" .
$ docker run -it --rm "mymultishell"

You can pass a shorter list of versions instead of the full $(sh shvr.sh targets).

The build follows --platform: it reads BuildKit's TARGETARCH, so the musl and Rust cross-targets always match the platform you ask for. To build for linux/arm64 (the native architecture on Apple Silicon), just pass the platform — there is no separate arch flag to keep in sync:

$ docker buildx build --platform linux/arm64 \
    -t "mymultishell" --build-arg TARGETS="$(sh shvr.sh targets)" .

Omitting --platform builds for the host architecture.

This is particularly useful if you want to test a version that we don't bundle by default, such as an old patch. Our scripts are able to build most intermediate versions without modifications, but we can't include them all in any of the default images.

Updating the Version Lists

The supported versions live in versions/<shell>.{all,current} (plus an optional versions/<shell>.excluded denylist). To pull in new upstream releases, run sh shvr.sh update [<shell>] (with no argument it updates every shell), which refreshes versions/<shell>.all from each shell's upstream source. Probe any newly-discovered versions before shipping them; if one fails to build with the current toolchain, add it to versions/<shell>.excluded (with a comment recording the failure) and re-run the update to drop it. An exclusion line is just the version (5.3.1), optionally followed by the architecture it fails on (5.3.1 arm64) — the version is dropped from every architecture either way (the published lists stay identical across architectures), and the arch tag documents where it failed so it can be re-enabled once fixed. Finally, run sh shvr.sh github_regen_all to regenerate the .github/ build matrix from the data files, and commit versions/ and .github/ together.