Put Your Docker Images on a Diet with Alpine Linux (2015)
Archival repost — originally published on my old blog on June 21, 2015, back when Alpine was still a dark-horse pick rather than the default. Already in English, lightly cleaned up for dev.to (fixed a few typos). Alpine did go on to become the mainstream slim-base choice — but it's not the automatic right answer anymore either: its musl libc trips up some native Node/Python modules, and DNS…
This 2015 article discusses the benefits of using Alpine Linux as a base for Docker images. At the time, popular base images for Docker containers included Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian, but these heavyweight distributions led to larger image sizes. Alpine Linux, a lightweight Linux distribution, offered an alternative by providing a smaller image size.
Its popularity among Docker users grew rapidly, leading to more Docker images being built on Alpine. The author had been using Alpine before it became the default option on Docker Hub, and they found the switch simple and beneficial. Although Alpine's musl libc and DNS resolution issues could pose challenges for some applications, it remained a viable choice for creating smaller Docker images. The author's Dockerfiles and Docker Hub images are still available for readers to explore.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
