Set up GUAC with Docker Compose

If you’d prefer, you can set up GUAC with Kubernetes with the experimental Helm charts provided by Kusari. Note that these helm charts are still experimental and are hosted in a third-party repo and may not be synchronized with the GUAC repo.

GUAC consists of multiple components. You may have seen a subset of these used in various GUAC demos. To get the most value out of GUAC, you’ll need to set up all components. This tutorial will walk you through how to deploy GUAC, using Docker Compose, so that you get the full set of components.

If you’re curious about the various GUAC components and what they do, see How GUAC components work together.

Setup video

A video format of these setup instructions is available here:

Table of contents

Set up GUAC with Docker Compose

Prerequisites

Optional - Verify images and binaries

Follow Verification of the GUAC images and binaries

Step 1: Download GUAC

Download the GUAC CLI guacone binary for your machine’s OS and architecture from the latest GUAC release if you have not already done so. For example Linux x86_64 is `guacone-linux-amd64’.
Rename the binary to guacone, mark it executable if necessary, and add it to your shell’s path.
Download the compose files from the latest GUAC release. Look for an attached file guac-compose-<release-tag>.tar.gz. At the time of writing, this is: guac-compose-v0.1.1.tar.gz.
Untar the compose files and change to that directory. (the rest of the steps need to be done from this directory):
```
tar zxvf guac-compose-v0.1.1.tar.gz
cd guac-compose
```
Optional: If you want test data to use, download and unzip GUAC’s test data.

Step 2: Start the GUAC server

In another terminal, from the guac-compose directory, run:
```
docker compose up --force-recreate
```
Verify that GUAC is running:
```
docker compose ls --filter "name=guac"
```
You should see:
```
NAME                STATUS              CONFIG FILES
guac                running(7)          /Users/lumb/go/src/github.com/guacsec/guac/docker-compose.yml
```
If you don’t see the above, run docker compose down and try starting up GUAC again. Because Docker Compose caches the containers used, the unclean state can cause issues.

GUAC Ports

Port Number	GUAC Component	Note
8080	GraphQL server	To see the GraphQL playground, visit http://localhost:8080
4222	Nats	This is where any collectors that you run will need to connect to push any docs they find. The GUAC collector command defaults to `nats://127.0.0.1:4222` for the Nats address, so this will work automatically

Step 3: Start Ingesting Data

You can run the guacone collect files ingestion command to load data into your GUAC deployment. For example we can ingest the sample guac-data data. However, you may ingest what you wish to here instead.

guacone collect files guac-data-main/docs

Switch back to the compose window and you will soon see that the OSV certifier recognized the new packages and is looking up vulnerability information for them.

Step 4: Check that everything is ingesting and running

Run:

curl 'http://localhost:8080/query' -s -X POST -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "query": "{ packages(pkgSpec: {}) { type } }"
  }' | jq

You should see the types of all the packages ingested

{
  "data": {
    "packages": [
      {
        "type": "oci"
      },
...

What is running?

Congratulations, you are now running a full GUAC deployment! Taking a look at the docker-compose.yaml we can see what is actually running:

Nats: Used for communication between the GUAC components. It is available on port 4222.
Collector-Subscriber: Helps communicate to the collectors when additional information is needed.
GraphQL Server: Serves GUAC GraphQL queries and stores the data. As the in-memory backend is used, no separate backend is needed behind the server.
Ingestor: Listens for things to ingest through Nats, then pushes to the GraphQL Server. The ingestor also runs the assembler and parser internally.
Image Collector: Can pull OCI image metadata (SBOMs and attestations) from registries for further inspection.
Deps.dev Collector: Gathers further information from Deps.dev for supported packages.
OSV Certifier: Gathers OSV vulnerability information from osv.dev about packages.

Next steps

The compose configuration is suitable to leave running in an environment that is accessible to your environment for further GUAC ingestion, discovery, analysis, and evaluation. Keep in mind that the in-memory backend is not persistent. Explore the types of collectors available in the collector binary and see what will work for your build, ingestion, and SBOM workflow. These collectors can be run as another service that watches a location for new documents to ingest.