Add an Alpine variant?

[chorrell]

Having an Alpine variant would be useful.

This primarily depends on nodejs/build#75 though

[Starefossen]

Related: nodejs/docker-iojs#44 and nodejs/docker-iojs#80

[notslang]

Related: https://github.com/mhart/alpine-node

[Starefossen]

Ok, it looks like the Docker guys have given Alpine an official 👍 by adding :alpine variants to many of their managed official images:

https://github.com/docker-library/python/blob/master/3.5/alpine/Dockerfile
https://github.com/docker-library/redis/blob/master/3.0/alpine/Dockerfile

[chorrell]

Nice!

For nodejs/build#75, testing builds against a Docker container I think would be good enough for our use case, but obviously they'd want a VM to build against too.

[gabeio]

👍 the alpine image is amazingly small

golang also has an alpine image! (hope this helps)
https://github.com/docker-library/golang/blob/master/1.6/alpine/Dockerfile

[retrohacker]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000827

This seems relevant to the convo

[tianon]

Using the word "switching" there is a fair bit misleading -- we're not outright replacing the base in any image so far, since the potential for breakage by doing so is far too great. In the cases where this is happening, we're simply offering an Alpine-based alternative for space-conscious consumers.

[retrohacker]

Thank you for clarifying @tianon.

I'm going to work on some sort of automated testing for our PR process. If memory serves that was the blocker to trying to ship an alpine or scratch image.

nodejs/docker-iojs#44

[ncopa]

@retrohacker make check works once those 2 pull requests are merged:
nodejs/node#5099
nodejs/node#5056

I think all the issues should be resolved now.

[retrohacker]

@ncopa you rock! Those PRs are 🔥

[ncopa]

@retrohacker anything else preventing this to move forward?

[retrohacker]

@ncopa testing is all that is left.

If we can simply get something that runs dante to smoke test 4 or 5 popular node modules on each PR, I would be happy to go to bat for this.

This is what I do at NodeSource to reassure myself I'm not shipping a broken runtime: https://github.com/nodesource/docker-nsolid/blob/master/tests/npm/smoke_test.sh

[retrohacker]

Adding in make check would be awesome if there is a way to do that without doing the whole build in the container.