MintToolkit in Tekton/EKS Pipeline

[tppalani]

**Goal:** 

Run MintToolkit (mint slim) inside a Tekton pipeline on EKS to slim container images.
Environment: EKS (Kubernetes), Tekton Pipelines, Red Hat UBI8 base image, Buildah available, no Docker/Podman daemon by default.

**Steps Tried:**

Installed MintToolkit CLI and sensor in the container.
Attempted to run Mint with Podman service started and DOCKER_HOST set.
Encountered errors: missing Docker/Podman socket, missing fuse kernel module, and overlay mount failures.

**Findings:**

Mint requires a running Docker or Podman daemon and socket, which are not available in standard Tekton/EKS environments.
Kernel modules like fuse are not present or cannot be loaded in Tekton containers, causing overlay mount failures.
Buildah works natively in Tekton for image slimming, but Mint cannot run due to runtime and kernel limitations.

**Question:**

Is there a supported or recommended way to run MintToolkit in Tekton/EKS, or is it only possible in environments with full Docker/Podman and kernel access?

[kcq]

@tppalani Mint needs a container runtime to do its dynamic profiling. The closest option with your environment to try is the kubernetes runtime. It's pretty basic and its still in "alpha" stage, but it has shown to be functional for a number of environments. The --target-kube-workload and --kube-manifest-file flags are used to use the k8s container runtime. Here's an example that uses these flags with k8s: https://github.com/mintoolkit/examples/tree/master/kubernetes-deployment-simple

[tppalani]

Hi @kcq

Thanks for the response. I think the above approach is applicable for app teams deploying application images. I’m from the platform team, and I’m creating base images to supply to app teams for their applications. Is there a supported Mint workflow for slimming base images in Tekton/EKS, or should we use Buildah for this use case?