History
From a handful of personal shell scripts to a secure container toolkit used around the world.
Bastille has evolved over the years from a small collection of personal shell scripts into a secure container automation toolkit used on hardware ranging from the tiny Raspberry Pi to powerful servers in the data center and cloud.
The early scripts were informed by concepts from ezjail and iocage — both
FreeBSD innovations in their time. Bastille would not exist without those that
came before. Thank you.
Many of Bastille’s automation ideas come from lessons learned over a decade as a
SaltStack contributor and the FreeBSD sysutils/py-salt package maintainer (now
retired). Those concepts evolved into the Bastillefile template system, and
then into our sister project, Rocinante,
in 2021.
Combine those security and automation practices with FreeBSD’s production-tested foundation, and you have Bastille. Over the years, open-source contributors around the world have made it more robust, more mature, and better able to handle a wide range of use cases.
Release timeline
This list is pulled live from the GitHub releases API when the site is built, so it stays current with every new Bastille release — no manual updates required. The earliest milestones below predate GitHub releases.
First public releases
Bastille goes public and lands in the FreeBSD ports tree at sysutils/bastille.
The project begins
A collection of personal shell scripts for automating FreeBSD jails takes shape and becomes Bastille.
See the full release history on GitHub →
Contributors
Software doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Bastille has seen improvements from open-source contributors across more than a dozen countries.
Project Lead: Christer Edwards
To everyone who has contributed to Bastille — thank you.