Kali provides official Kali Docker images that are updated once a week on Docker Hub. You can thus easily build your own Kali containers on top of those that we provide. We offer various images to try and suit your needs, all with a different variation of Kali Linux as they use unique branches for the source.

Please note, all the images below do not come with the “default” metapackage. You will need to apt update && apt -y install kali-linux-headless.

Here’s a quick review of the various images available (for more detailed information, see our branch page). First those that you might reasonably want to use:

• kalilinux/kali-rolling is the main image that you should likely use, tracking the continuously-updated kali-rolling package repository, just like the default images.
• kalilinux/kali-last-release is built from the kali-last-snapshot repository, it is tracking the last versioned release (e.g. 2019.4, 2020.1, etc.) and will not get any update until the next release.

And those that you will likely not need except in very special cases:

• kalilinux/kali-bleeding-edge is exactly like kalilinux/kali-rolling with the “kali-bleeding-edge” repository enabled.
• kalilinux/kali-experimental is exactly like kalilinux/kali-rolling with the kali-experimental repository enabled. Might be useful to test some not-yet-ready updates uploaded to “kali-experimental” by Kali developers who are looking for feedback.
• kalilinux/kali-dev is an image tracking the kali-dev repository used by Kali developers to merge updates coming from Debian and changes maintained by Kali Linux. It can be useful to rebuild (or do test rebuild of) Kali packages.

If you want to improve our official Docker images, have a look at the kali-docker project in our GitLab. We use GitLab CI to automate the build of our Docker images.