Our ubuntu machine image is the default for machine pipelines and remote Docker instances within CircleCI and is built with continuous integration in mind. This image is a standalone Ubuntu 20.04 virtual machine.
This image contains the minimum tools required to operate a build on CircleCI (such as git) as well as extremely popular and useful tools in CircleCI (such as docker).
This image can be used with the CircleCI machine executor and can also be used with the ARM resource class.
For example:
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jobs:
build:
machine:
image: ubuntu-2004:2024.11.1
# If running ARM, the resource class needs to be added. Omitting this defaults to amd64
resource_class: arm.medium
steps:
- checkout
# Whatever you want to do
- run: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y cowsay
- run: cowsay Continuous Integration Rocks!In the above example, the CircleCI Ubuntu image is used as the virtual machine image.
More specifically, the tag 2024.11.1 indicates the dated version of the base image.
See how tags work below for more information.
This image contains the Ubuntu Linux operating system and everything needed to run most builds on CircleCI. This includes but is not limited to:
build-essential package containing compiling toolsImages in this family are tagged by their release date.
This creates a snapshot to use where you know the items in the image won't change on you.
When determinism for your CI pipeline is crucial, these are the images you want to use.
The format for these tags are YYYY.MM.X where YYYY is the 4-digit year, MM is the two-digit month, and X is the numbered release that month.
Unless an important patch release is done, X will typically be 1.
There is also a current tag which will always point to the most recent supported release.
This tags means you don't have to keep track of the latest version and manually update your config, with the trade off that it can on occasion include a breaking change.
Older tags in this family are tagged by their release date as YYYYMM-DD.