🚀 Call for Maintainers — Help Shape the Future of Kaniko

[mzihlmann]

Hi everyone 👋

As many of you know, the original Kaniko project, developed and maintained by Google, has unfortunately been archived. To keep Kaniko alive, for myself and others, I started this community fork. At first, the goal was simply to fix a few long-standing issues. But over time, the scope has grown. We’re now working to modernize Kaniko in various ways, ensuring it stays relevant and reliable for the future.

Right now, I’m the sole maintainer of this fork, and while progress is steady, the project would greatly benefit from a few more dedicated hands and diverse perspectives, not least to ensure there is no single point of failure in this project anymore.

🛠️ What We’re Looking For

We're looking for new maintainers who:

• Use or have used Kaniko
• Have experience with Go, containers, or CI/CD systems (or are eager to learn)
• Can help triage issues, review PRs, and propose improvements
• Believe in open collaboration and maintaining a welcoming community

💡 How You Can Contribute

Even small contributions make a big difference! You can:

• Review and merge community pull requests
• Help debug and reproduce user-reported issues
• Update documentation and examples
• Participate in design discussions for new features

📣 How to Get Involved

If you’re interested in helping maintain Kaniko, please comment below or contact me directly on the kubernetes slack (@martizih).

It would be great if you could share:

• Your background or interest in Kaniko
• How you’d like to contribute (code, docs, reviews, releases, etc.)

This fork exists because the community still relies on Kaniko — and together, we can ensure it continues to thrive. 💙
Thank you to everyone who continues to use, improve, and support the project! 🙇

[nejch]

Hey @mzihlmann, I just wanted to say thanks for the write-up here, really appreciated!

Although I opened #301 I'm not sure I'd have capacity to join as maintainer myself as I'm already a bit involved in a few other tools around the GitLab ecosystem (which heavily relies on kaniko for unprivileged CI builds) as well as upstream. If things take off though, I'd be able to help occasionally with things like CI config, triaging/answering support issues on how to use kaniko. It'd be great if GitLab folks could step up a bit and join here rather than downstream, let's see if that works out!

We use kaniko extensively as part of operating our platform (we run a large self-hosted GitLab instance) and often document/help users setting it up for our environment including proxies etc.

[mzihlmann]

Much appreciated.
Just as a general update, we're now already a team of 4 people so far, and we're experimenting with mandatory reviews of PRs, as from personal experience this is crucial to keep everyone in the loop. Although not maintainers in a Github sense, they are very much maintainers of this project. We can extend permissions, depending on workload and availability, but so far this works pretty well.
We appreciate any contribution, based on your background it seems you're very experienced in how kaniko gets used and which pitfalls exist, this is most valuable, especially in planning discussions. So invite is out regardless 😊
Thank you

[mzihlmann]

It would be great if you could still join the k8s slack, we're currently using it for internal communication and coordination.

[nejch]

Thanks @mzihlmann, joined today 👍