Alpine Linux : A Tiny Tiny Docker Image

Do you know Alpine Linux ? It’s a Tiny Linux distribution based on busybox.

Every one working with docker now that it takes a lot of disk space. That’s why here at ERDF Lyon we are using Docker-Alpine to build our own services..

It is very cool to have a very small containers, for example the base image is only 5 Mb, comparatively to a debian base docker or a centos it’s amazing !!

Here is a list of some images builds by our team :

[root@XXXXX ~]# docker images

REPOSITORY                                               TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             VIRTUAL SIZE

library/alpine-java                  latest              b1ac8a415cc2        8 minutes ago       167 MB

library/alpine-nginx-php             latest              04dd1dd5f3a8        36 minutes ago      73.07 MB

library/alpine-adaje-nginx           latest              babdce2f7acb        2 hours ago         22.34 MB

library/alpine-influxdb              latest              8c1c8602ab3d        5 hours ago         43.71 MB

library/alpine-grafana               latest              87e008359f09        7 hours ago         105 MB

alpine-libc                          latest              768e1a26255d        8 hours ago         14.01 MB

alpine                               latest              809d1eb48c44        9 weeks ago         5.244 MB

library/centos6                      latest              5af3557457ba        5 months ago        396.1 MB

 

as you can see the base alpine is only 5.2MB, an Alpine image with nginx is only 43 MB and even an image with the full java runtime pre-installed is 167MB.

Against a centos6 base (with nothing on it) that takes nearly 400MB : y’a pas photo !!

 

We already have our own docker registry so we just have to build and push a lot of new images base on this tiny Docker image..

Here what’s in the pipeline :

• alpine-mysql
• alpine-postgresql
• alpine-apache (already build from a centos)
• alpine-zabbix-server
• alpine-zabbix-frontend
• alpine-jenkins (already build from a centos)
• alpine-python (already build from a centos)
• alpine-ansible (already build from a centos)