I made a container for using the imagebuilder as I often found myself having to install tons of perl dependencies on my system of which many I'm never going to use again and I don't want them dangling.
Containerfile:
# for building with the imagebuilders
# build: podman build . --tag openwrt-builder
# run like: cd openwrt-imagebuilder*; podman run --rm -i -v ./:/src:rw,Z openwrt-builder <your build command, e.g. image PROFILE="_" PACKAGES="_">
# output will be on the same openwrt-imagebuilder directory
FROM registry.access.redhat.com/ubi9/ubi-minimal:latest
RUN microdnf install -y make patch perl bzip2 wget diffutils && microdnf clean all && rm -rf /var/lib/{rpm,dnf}
VOLUME [ "/src" ]
WORKDIR /src
ENTRYPOINT [ "/usr/bin/make" ]
CMD []
place it on an empty dir named "Containerfile" (or "Dockerfile") and run podman build . --tag openwrt-builder
then on the openwrt-imagebuilder-${version}-* dir run podman run --rm -i -v ./:/src:rw,Z openwrt-builder <your build command without make>
e.g. podman run --rm -i -v ./:/src:rw,Z openwrt-builder help
then you can get rid of the container image with podman rmi openwrt-builder to free the space from all those deps or keep it for further builds without polluting your system
Below is pretty much what the ASU server is doing, with some different volume mounts for repo config and stuff, but mostly identical. The (newer) containers are initially empty, you have to source the setup.sh script to get it set up, then you just treat it like any other imagebuilder. When ASU server uses it for the build, it copies the desired artifacts (the bin/.../manifest and imgs) to the store dir, so you don't have any transient junk to clean up on the host (other that the images you've already mentioned).
$ podman run -it -v ./store/:/builder/store:rw,U,Z ghcr.io/openwrt/imagebuilder:x86-64-openwrt-24.10
buildbot@fb186b2727db:~$ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x. 1 buildbot buildbot 88 Jul 10 13:46 .
dr-xr-xr-x. 1 root root 12 Jul 10 13:46 ..
-rw-r--r--. 1 buildbot buildbot 220 Mar 27 2022 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--. 1 buildbot buildbot 3526 Mar 27 2022 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x. 1 buildbot buildbot 156 Jun 12 06:14 keys
-rw-r--r--. 1 buildbot buildbot 807 Mar 27 2022 .profile
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 995 Jun 12 06:12 setup.sh
drwxr-xr-x. 1 buildbot buildbot 134 Jul 10 13:42 store
buildbot@fb186b2727db:~$ . setup.sh
2025-07-10 13:47:52 URL:https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/24.10-SNAPSHOT/targets/x86/64/sha256sums [5222880/5222880] -> "sha256sums" [1]
...
removed 'openwrt-imagebuilder-24.10-SNAPSHOT-x86-64.Linux-x86_64.tar.zst'
buildbot@fb186b2727db:~$ make help
Available Commands:
help: This help text
...
I found that you don't even need to source the setup script if you use a tag
just pulled quay.io/openwrt/imagebuilder:mediatek-mt7622-24.10.2 for my AX3200 and ran my make command and it produced the images. nice!
maybe could be better documented, or even shown on the firmware-selector.openwrt.org site when customizing packages as an alternative to making openwrt's servers do it
