ci(kaniko): move the remaining eight builds to the maintained fork

Pipeline 6861 answered the question the staged first step was there to ask.
build-alpine-jq ran on the fork's v1.25.18, unpacked the rootfs, executed the
RUN, and pushed both destinations to the Gitea registry at digest a430c9c6 —
while the seven untouched kaniko steps stayed green in the same run. The
executor behaves the same and the registry auth path is unaffected, so the rest
can follow.

This moves the other seven steps here plus the one in ci-claude-refresh.yml.
Nothing but the image: lines change; no flags, no commands, no credentials.
That leaves zero gcr.io/kaniko-project references in the pipelines.

The per-step note from the first commit is gone. It described a migration state
that no longer exists, and a comment that survives its own situation is how the
velero schedule ended up claiming there was no CNPG cluster in a namespace that
had one. The durable half moved to the file header, where it explains why the
kaniko image is not Google's and why the pin is past the version their repo
ended on.

Also corrects the admission policy's comment, which cited
gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor as the image its exemption was verified against.
Worth being precise about what did not change: the policy matches on the buildx
plugin image only and never on kaniko, so the swap needed no policy edit — which
is exactly why the stale image reference in the prose was easy to miss.

Closes #552

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

.woodpecker/build-ci-images.yml

@@ -1,6 +1,17 @@
 # Builds the CI tooling images (and the secret-rotator runtime image) with
 # kaniko and pushes them to the Gitea container registry.
 #
+# The kaniko image is NOT Google's. Google archived
+# GoogleContainerTools/kaniko on 2025-06-03, but the original authors forked
+# it to chainguard-dev/kaniko and kept releasing — the pin here is well past
+# the v1.24.0 the Google repo ended on. The fork ships no binaries or images
+# of its own, so these come from gitlab-ci-utils, which builds that fork for
+# amd64 and arm64 under versioned tags. A generic `:debug` tag exists there
+# and is deliberately unused; everything else in this repo is pinned too.
+#
+# The executor path, flags and busybox layout are unchanged from Google's
+# image, which is why the swap touched nothing but the `image:` lines (#552).
+#
 # Credential: ci_images_token — a PAT scoped to `package: read+write` and
 # NOTHING else (verified: 403 on /user/repos, /admin/users and the issues
 # API; 200 on the /v2/ registry endpoints kaniko uses). It replaces the
@@ -25,7 +36,7 @@ when:
 
 steps:
   - name: build-ansible
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/ansible
     depends_on: []
     # Only rebuild when THIS image's source (or the pipeline file) changed, or
@@ -53,7 +64,7 @@ steps:
           --destination gitea.renner.uno/gitea_admin/ci-ansible:latest
 
   - name: build-k8s
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/k8s
     depends_on: []
     when:
@@ -77,7 +88,7 @@ steps:
           --destination gitea.renner.uno/gitea_admin/ci-k8s:latest
 
   - name: build-tofu
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/tofu
     depends_on: []
     when:
@@ -108,7 +119,7 @@ steps:
   # Runtime image, not CI tooling: a static musl binary in a FROM-scratch image,
   # used as the base for secret-rotation CronJobs. Replaces per-job inline Python.
   - name: build-secret-rotator
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: secret-rotator
     depends_on: []
     when:
@@ -136,21 +147,6 @@ steps:
   # not for who uses it — its first consumer is the zigbee2mqtt seed-data init
   # container, but nothing about it is zigbee-specific. Exists so tools come from
   # the image rather than an `apk add` on every container start.
-  # First step moved to the maintained kaniko fork (#552). Google archived
-  # GoogleContainerTools/kaniko on 2025-06-03, but the original authors forked
-  # it to chainguard-dev/kaniko and kept releasing: this is v1.25.18, well past
-  # the v1.24.0 the Google repo ended on. The fork publishes no binaries of its
-  # own, so the image comes from gitlab-ci-utils, which builds it for amd64 and
-  # arm64 with versioned tags.
-  #
-  # Same /kaniko/executor path, same flags, and /bin/sh, base64, tr, mkdir and
-  # date are all present — verified by pulling the image and running it, not by
-  # reading the README.
-  #
-  # Deliberately only this step for now. A change to this file rebuilds every
-  # step anyway, so one run gives the new executor on alpine-jq beside seven
-  # unchanged kaniko builds — an A/B in a single pipeline. The other seven and
-  # ci-claude-refresh.yml follow once this one is green.
   - name: build-alpine-jq
     image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/alpine-jq
@@ -181,7 +177,7 @@ steps:
   # critical path of every node rebuild. The download now happens here, once,
   # where the sha256 is checked — see the Containerfile for the full rationale.
   - name: build-cni-plugins
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/cni-plugins
     depends_on: []
     when:
@@ -210,7 +206,7 @@ steps:
   # every paperless pod start. The openssl CLI is genuinely absent from the alpine
   # base, so this one needs an image rather than a busybox substitute.
   - name: build-alpine-openssl
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/alpine-openssl
     depends_on: []
     when:
@@ -239,7 +235,7 @@ steps:
   # Ansible converge. Not a ci-* image -- it is a runtime artifact -- but it
   # builds the same way and lands in the same registry so the audit sees it.
   - name: build-heating-can
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/heating-can
     depends_on: []
     when:

.woodpecker/ci-claude-refresh.yml

@@ -130,7 +130,7 @@ steps:
   #    --build-arg to the resolved version (not "latest") guarantees the tag and
   #    the image content agree even if a new release lands mid-run.
   - name: build
-    image: gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor:v1.23.2-debug
+    image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci-utils/container-images/kaniko:v1.25.18-debug
     directory: ci/images/claude
     depends_on: [decide]
     environment:

kubernetes/infrastructure/admission-policies/woodpecker-ci-restrict.yaml

@@ -12,9 +12,11 @@
 #   * host namespaces + hostPath volumes: denied for every step pod (neither
 #     kaniko nor the buildx plugin needs them).
 #   * privileged containers: denied EXCEPT the allow-listed buildx plugin image.
-# Verified non-breaking: this repo's own builds use rootless kaniko
-# (gcr.io/kaniko-project/executor) which needs none of the above; only the
-# external buildx plugin needs privileged, and it is allow-listed by image ref.
+# Verified non-breaking: this repo's own builds use rootless kaniko, which needs
+# none of the above; only the external buildx plugin needs privileged, and it is
+# allow-listed by image ref. The kaniko image moved off gcr.io to the maintained
+# chainguard-dev fork in #552 — no policy change was needed, because nothing
+# here matches on the kaniko image, only on the buildx one.
 #
 # ValidatingAdmissionPolicy is GA / in-tree on the cluster's Kubernetes v1.35 —
 # no external admission controller (Kyverno/Gatekeeper) is introduced.