Better base Docker images

Stable images

• Alpine: better/baseimage:alpine-3.10
• Alpine: better/baseimage:analytics-alpine-3.9
• Node Alpine: better/baseimage:node-alpine-3.10

Alpine

The base Alpine image sets up the app user and installs several useful libraries, along with Python 3, the GCC toolchain, and RDS SSL certificates.

Analytics

The analytics image builds on the Alpine image, adding Postgres and a number of useful Python packages (Numpy, Tensorflow, etc).

Node Alpine

The Node Alpine image is a minimal node image that has ssl certs updated and librdkafka (no python, gcc, etc).

Testing

You can verify that this works by building locally, e.g. docker build . -f Dockerfile.analytics.

Publishing an image

The tag convention for Git and Docker is as follows: [prefix]-[distro]-[version].

For the base image, there is no prefix, so a typical tag would be alpine-1.0.

When a tag (e.g. alpine-3.7) needs to be re-published, the following should be done:

• git push origin :alpine-3.7 - this deletes the existing Git tag on remote
• git tag -d alpine-3.7 - this deletes the existing Git tag on local
• git tag alpine-3.7 - this tags master
• git push origin master --tags - this pushes the new tag to remote and kicks off Docker Hub build. Note that it can take several hours to finish.