bitnami-containers/bitnami/clickhouse

Bitnami Secure Image for ClickHouse

What is ClickHouse?

ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented OLAP database management system. Use it to boost your database performance while providing linear scalability and hardware efficiency.

Overview of ClickHouse Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

TL;DR

docker run --name clickhouse bitnami/clickhouse:latest

⚠️ Important Notice: Upcoming changes to the Bitnami Catalog

Beginning August 28th, 2025, Bitnami will evolve its public catalog to offer a curated set of hardened, security-focused images under the new Bitnami Secure Images initiative. As part of this transition:

• Granting community users access for the first time to security-optimized versions of popular container images.
• Bitnami will begin deprecating support for non-hardened, Debian-based software images in its free tier and will gradually remove non-latest tags from the public catalog. As a result, community users will have access to a reduced number of hardened images. These images are published only under the “latest” tag and are intended for development purposes
• Starting August 28th, over two weeks, all existing container images, including older or versioned tags (e.g., 2.50.0, 10.6), will be migrated from the public catalog (docker.io/bitnami) to the “Bitnami Legacy” repository (docker.io/bitnamilegacy), where they will no longer receive updates.
• For production workloads and long-term support, users are encouraged to adopt Bitnami Secure Images, which include hardened containers, smaller attack surfaces, CVE transparency (via VEX/KEV), SBOMs, and enterprise support.

These changes aim to improve the security posture of all Bitnami users by promoting best practices for software supply chain integrity and up-to-date deployments. For more details, visit the Bitnami Secure Images announcement.

Why use Bitnami Secure Images?

• Bitnami Secure Images and Helm charts are built to make open source more secure and enterprise ready.
• Triage security vulnerabilities faster, with transparency into CVE risks using industry standard Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange (VEX), KEV, and EPSS scores.
• Our hardened images use a minimal OS (Photon Linux), which reduces the attack surface while maintaining extensibility through the use of an industry standard package format.
• Stay more secure and compliant with continuously built images updated within hours of upstream patches.
• Bitnami containers, virtual machines and cloud images use the same components and configuration approach - making it easy to switch between formats based on your project needs.
• Hardened images come with attestation signatures (Notation), SBOMs, virus scan reports and other metadata produced in an SLSA-3 compliant software factory.

Only a subset of BSI applications are available for free. Looking to access the entire catalog of applications as well as enterprise support? Try the commercial edition of Bitnami Secure Images today.

How to deploy ClickHouse in Kubernetes?

Deploying Bitnami applications as Helm Charts is the easiest way to get started with our applications on Kubernetes. Read more about the installation in the Bitnami ClickHouse Chart GitHub repository.

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

Learn more about the Bitnami tagging policy and the difference between rolling tags and immutable tags in our documentation page.

You can see the equivalence between the different tags by taking a look at the tags-info.yaml file present in the branch folder, i.e bitnami/ASSET/BRANCH/DISTRO/tags-info.yaml.

Subscribe to project updates by watching the bitnami/containers GitHub repo.

Get this image

The recommended way to get the Bitnami ClickHouse Docker Image is to pull the prebuilt image from the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/clickhouse:latest

To use a specific version, you can pull a versioned tag. You can view the list of available versions in the Docker Hub Registry.

docker pull bitnami/clickhouse:[TAG]

If you wish, you can also build the image yourself by cloning the repository, changing to the directory containing the Dockerfile and executing the docker build command. Remember to replace the APP, VERSION and OPERATING-SYSTEM path placeholders in the example command below with the correct values.

git clone https://github.com/bitnami/containers.git
cd bitnami/APP/VERSION/OPERATING-SYSTEM
docker build -t bitnami/APP:latest .

Persisting your application

If you remove the container all your data will be lost, and the next time you run the image the database will be reinitialized. To avoid this loss of data, you should mount a volume that will persist even after the container is removed.

For persistence you should mount a directory at the /bitnami/clickhouse path. If the mounted directory is empty, it will be initialized on the first run.

docker run \
    --volume /path/to/clickhouse-persistence:/bitnami/clickhouse \
    --env ALLOM_EMPTY_PASSWORD=false \
    bitnami/clickhouse:latest

You can also do this with a minor change to the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

clickhouse:
  ...
  volumes:
    - /path/to/clickhouse-persistence:/bitnami/clickhouse
  ...

Connecting to other containers

Using Docker container networking, a different server running inside a container can easily be accessed by your application containers and vice-versa.

Containers attached to the same network can communicate with each other using the container name as the hostname.

Using the Command Line

In this example, we will create a ClickHouse client instance that will connect to the server instance that is running on the same docker network as the client.

Step 1: Create a network

docker network create my-network --driver bridge

Step 2: Launch the ClickHouse container within your network

Use the --network <NETWORK> argument to the docker run command to attach the container to the my-network network.

docker run -d --name clickhouse-server \
  --network my-network \
  --env ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes \
  bitnami/clickhouse:latest

Step 3: Launch your ClickHouse client instance

Finally we create a new container instance to launch the ClickHouse client and connect to the server created in the previous step:

docker run -it --rm \
    --network my-network \
    bitnami/clickhouse:latest clickhouse-client --host clickhouse-server

Using a Docker Compose file

When not specified, Docker Compose automatically sets up a new network and attaches all deployed services to that network. However, we will explicitly define a new bridge network named my-network. In this example we assume that you want to connect to the ClickHouse server from your own custom application image which is identified in the following snippet by the service name myapp.

version: '2'

networks:
  my-network:
    driver: bridge

services:
  clickhouse:
    image: bitnami/clickhouse:latest
    environment:
      - ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=no
    networks:
      - my-network
  myapp:
    image: YOUR_APPLICATION_IMAGE
    networks:
      - my-network

IMPORTANT:

1. Please update the YOUR_APPLICATION_IMAGE placeholder in the above snippet with your application image
2. In your application container, use the hostname clickhouse to connect to the ClickHouse server

Launch the containers using:

docker-compose up -d

Configuration

ClickHouse can be configured via environment variables or using a configuration file (config.xml). If a configuration option is not specified in either the configuration file or in an environment variable, ClickHouse uses its internal default configuration.

Configuration overrides

The configuration can easily be setup by mounting your own configuration overrides on the directory /bitnami/clickhouse/etc/config.d or /bitnami/clickhouse/etc/users.d:

docker run --name clickhouse \
    --volume /path/to/override.xml:/bitnami/clickhouse/etc/config.d/override.xml:ro \
    bitnami/clickhouse:latest

or using Docker Compose:

version: '2'

services:
  clickhouse:
    image: bitnami/clickhouse:latest
    volumes:
      - /path/to/override.xml:/bitnami/clickhouse/etc/config.d/override.xml:ro

Check the official ClickHouse configuration documentation for all the possible overrides and settings.

Initializing a new instance

When the container is executed for the first time, it will execute the files with extensions .sh located at /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d. For scripts to be executed every time the container starts, use the /docker-entrypoint-startdb.d folder.

In order to have your custom files inside the docker image you can mount them as a volume.

NOTE: If you use JSON format for clickhouse logs and remove the message field of the logs, the application will fail to start if there are init or start scripts in any of those 2 folders.

Environment variables

Customizable environment variables

Name	Description	Default Value
ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD	Allow an empty password.	no
CLICKHOUSE_SKIP_USER_SETUP	Skip ClickHouse admin user setup.	no
CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_USER	ClickHouse admin username.	default
CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_PASSWORD	ClickHouse admin password.	nil
CLICKHOUSE_HTTP_PORT	ClickHouse HTTP port.	8123
CLICKHOUSE_TCP_PORT	ClickHouse TCP port.	9000
CLICKHOUSE_MYSQL_PORT	ClickHouse MySQL port.	9004
CLICKHOUSE_POSTGRESQL_PORT	ClickHouse PostgreSQL port.	9005
CLICKHOUSE_INTERSERVER_HTTP_PORT	ClickHouse Inter-server port.	9009

Read-only environment variables

Name	Description	Value
CLICKHOUSE_BASE_DIR	ClickHouse installation directory.	${BITNAMI_ROOT_DIR}/clickhouse
CLICKHOUSE_VOLUME_DIR	ClickHouse volume directory.	/bitnami/clickhouse
CLICKHOUSE_CONF_DIR	ClickHouse configuration directory.	${CLICKHOUSE_BASE_DIR}/etc
CLICKHOUSE_DEFAULT_CONF_DIR	ClickHouse configuration directory.	${CLICKHOUSE_BASE_DIR}/etc.default
CLICKHOUSE_MOUNTED_CONF_DIR	ClickHouse configuration directory.	${CLICKHOUSE_VOLUME_DIR}/etc
CLICKHOUSE_DATA_DIR	ClickHouse data directory.	${CLICKHOUSE_VOLUME_DIR}/data
CLICKHOUSE_LOG_DIR	ClickHouse logs directory.	${CLICKHOUSE_BASE_DIR}/logs
CLICKHOUSE_CONF_FILE	ClickHouse log file.	${CLICKHOUSE_CONF_DIR}/config.xml
CLICKHOUSE_LOG_FILE	ClickHouse log file.	${CLICKHOUSE_LOG_DIR}/clickhouse.log
CLICKHOUSE_ERROR_LOG_FILE	ClickHouse log file.	${CLICKHOUSE_LOG_DIR}/clickhouse_error.log
CLICKHOUSE_TMP_DIR	ClickHouse temporary directory.	${CLICKHOUSE_BASE_DIR}/tmp
CLICKHOUSE_PID_FILE	ClickHouse PID file.	${CLICKHOUSE_TMP_DIR}/clickhouse.pid
CLICKHOUSE_INITSCRIPTS_DIR	ClickHouse init scripts directory.	/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d
CLICKHOUSE_DAEMON_USER	ClickHouse daemon system user.	clickhouse
CLICKHOUSE_DAEMON_GROUP	ClickHouse daemon system group.	clickhouse

Setting the admin password on first run

Passing the CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_PASSWORD environment variable when running the image for the first time will set the password of the CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_USER user to the value of CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_PASSWORD.

docker run --name clickhouse -e CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_PASSWORD=password123 bitnami/clickhouse:latest

or by modifying the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

services:
  clickhouse:
  ...
    environment:
      - CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_PASSWORD=password123
  ...

Allowing empty passwords

By default the ClickHouse image expects all the available passwords to be set. In order to allow empty passwords, it is necessary to set the ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes env variable. This env variable is only recommended for testing or development purposes. We strongly recommend specifying the CLICKHOUSE_ADMIN_PASSWORD for any other scenario.

docker run --name clickhouse --env ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes bitnami/clickhouse:latest

or by modifying the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

services:
  clickhouse:
  ...
    environment:
      - ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes
  ...

FIPS configuration in Bitnami Secure Images

The Bitnami ClickHouse Docker image from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog includes extra features and settings to configure the container with FIPS capabilities. You can configure the next environment variables:

• OPENSSL_FIPS: whether OpenSSL runs in FIPS mode or not. yes (default), no.

Logging

The Bitnami ClickHouse Docker image sends the container logs to stdout. To view the logs:

docker logs clickhouse

You can configure the containers logging driver using the --log-driver option if you wish to consume the container logs differently. In the default configuration docker uses the json-file driver.

Maintenance

Upgrade this image

Bitnami provides up-to-date versions of ClickHouse, including security patches, soon after they are made upstream. We recommend that you follow these steps to upgrade your container.

Step 1: Get the updated image

docker pull bitnami/clickhouse:latest

or if you're using Docker Compose, update the value of the image property to bitnami/clickhouse:latest.

Step 2: Stop and backup the currently running container

Stop the currently running container using the command

docker stop clickhouse

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose stop clickhouse

Next, take a snapshot of the persistent volume /path/to/clickhouse-persistence using:

rsync -a /path/to/clickhouse-persistence /path/to/clickhouse-persistence.bkp.$(date +%Y%m%d-%H.%M.%S)

Step 3: Remove the currently running container

docker rm -v clickhouse

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose rm -v clickhouse

Step 4: Run the new image

Re-create your container from the new image.

docker run --name clickhouse bitnami/clickhouse:latest

or using Docker Compose:

docker-compose up clickhouse

Using docker-compose.yaml

Please be aware this file has not undergone internal testing. Consequently, we advise its use exclusively for development or testing purposes. For production-ready deployments, we highly recommend utilizing its associated Bitnami Helm chart.

If you detect any issue in the docker-compose.yaml file, feel free to report it or contribute with a fix by following our Contributing Guidelines.

Contributing

We'd love for you to contribute to this container. You can request new features by creating an issue or submitting a pull request with your contribution.

Issues

If you encountered a problem running this container, you can file an issue. For us to provide better support, be sure to fill the issue template.

License

Copyright © 2025 Broadcom. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.