preface: I'm not asking things rhetorically, I genuinely want to learn here.

> to not have any dependencies outside of the code.

> ... FROM scratch images is that you'll never have to update your base image to address CVEs...

So a FROM scratch image, basically doesn't have things like a package manager to install things, and maybe also libraries that things like curl would depend on? Sorry for my ignorance, I've heard of FROM scratch but never tried them.

There is nothing there.

If you want to run as another user, you need to manually add an /etc/group & /etc/password (or generate them in a stage before that and copy them over).

If you need ca-certificates, you need to install ca-certificates in a stage before that and copy over /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt from that stage to your current one.

Apparently you get only an empty root directory, nothing else. https://medium.com/@fabrizio.sgura/the-forgotten-minimalist-...