Getting started with Chisel - Chisel documentation

This tutorial will walk you through the creation of your first chiseled Ubuntu root file system, from installation to the slicing of Ubuntu packages.
The goal is to give you a basic understanding of what Chisel is and how to use it to install package slices. By the end of it, you will have a minimal slice of Ubuntu comprising only the necessary files to run our application.
Let’s install the Chisel from its GitHub releases page. If you prefer a different installation method, see How to install Chisel.
To install the latest Chisel binary:
Visit the latest release page to determine the latest version, for example, v1.5.0 (update the following steps according to your desired version and architecture).
Run the following command to download the file.
We publish checksum files for the release tarballs. Download the appropriate checksum file with the following command.
Verify the checksum with the following command:
Extract the contents of the downloaded tarball by running:
Install the Chisel binary. Make sure the installation directory is included in your system’s PATH environment variable. For example:
Once the installation is complete, verify that Chisel has been installed correctly by running:
This should produce output similar to the following:
The hello package has already been sliced and its slice definitions are available in the chisel-releases repository.
Before running Chisel, create an empty directory where the root file system should be located:
Finally, use the cut command to install the hello_bins slice from the ubuntu-24.04 chisel-release:
A quick look at the rootfs/ directory will show that the hello binary has been installed at rootfs/usr/bin/hello.
Notice that there are other files besides the hello binary. This is because the hello_bins slice depends on other slices, such as libc6_libs, which provides necessary runtime libraries:
When installing a slice, Chisel installs its dependencies as well.
Run hello from the chiseled root file system to verify that it works:
See what other CLI Commands are there, and have a look at the How-to guides for learning about other typical Chisel operations.