Alpine Linux versions

[paulodiovani]

I've been dealing with Alpine Linux for docker images lately and found a couple of good features:

• much smaller images
• easier package manager
• improved security (Alpine claims that)

So, what do you think of start using Alpine for these images?
I can write them if you like.

cc: @carloslopes @akitaonrails

[carloslopes]

Shouldn't docker be agnostic about the OS distribution that we are using?

We can see if DigitalOcean provides this distribution and active it in our CI environment.

[paulodiovani]

I think ou didn't get it, @carloslopes...

Docker images are based on an specific OS. Debian is the most used, but Ubuntu, CentOS and Alpine are common alternatives. Alpines has the advantages I've listed above.

This hasn't any impact on the host. So DigitalOcean and/or GitLab has nothing to do with it.

The impact is only that the Dockerfile will be a little different (different package system, not bash but sh from start, etc.)

[carloslopes]

Oh now I got what are you saying.

Let's give it a try, can you create a different image of ruby 2.4 (maybe called ruby 2.4-alpine) and then we can try to use it in some projects on GitLab. If we have some improvement, we change all images.

[cmer]

Could be interesting to try, but the benefits of Ubuntu is that it's very familiar to most people, and has a wide range of packages available (built in and third-party).