Tiny Docker Images

I had a play with the excellent Alpine Linux↗ over the weekend. Alpine describes itself as;

Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

And by lightweight they really do mean lightweight, with an 8MB container size and a 130MB bare metal installation it is tiny. Because of this I decided to use it as the new base images for my Docker Images↗ as some of them were getting a little bloated. As you can see from the table below, the difference in the final image size is staggering …

• ImageName / Before / After
• Base↗ / 244MB / 13MB
• NGINX-PHP↗ / 446MB / 76MB
• MariaDB↗ / 432MB / 189MB
• AB↗ / 261MB / 14MB

… even though I have stated before I am quite a snob when it comes to which Operating System I run I think Apline has definitely changed my mind.

So far I have managed to install everything I need from their package repo↗ with very little in the way of changes to my original CentOS 7 image↗ configuration. Very impressive stuff.

You can find my images on the Docker Hub↗ or the source on GitHub↗.