ihotte/alpine repository overview

⁠What is Alpine Linux?

Alpine Linux⁠ is a Linux distribution built around musl libc⁠ and BusyBox⁠. The image is only 5 MB in size and has access to a package repository⁠ that is much more complete than other BusyBox based images. This makes Alpine Linux a great image base for utilities and even production applications. Read more about Alpine Linux here⁠ and you can see how their mantra fits in right at home with Docker images.

⁠How to use this image

⁠Usage

Use like you would any other base image:

FROM alpine:3.14
RUN apk add --no-cache mysql-client
ENTRYPOINT ["mysql"]

This example has a virtual image size of only 36.8MB. Compare that to our good friend Ubuntu:

FROM ubuntu:20.04
RUN apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends mysql-client \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
ENTRYPOINT ["mysql"]

This yields us a virtual image size of about 145MB image.