Alpinx

A minimal and up-to-date nginx image based on Alpine Linux.

Why ?

At this time:

1. Nginx maintainers are still using a bloated debian:jessie base image
2. Alpine packages nginx stable (1.8) instead of mainline (1.9)

This image gives the best of both world: up-to-date nginx in a small image.

License

BSD 2-Clause, see accompanying LICENSE file.

Usage

The latest build of this image (1.9.11) is available on Docker Hub

docker run -p 8080:80 huguesb/alpinx

Or

FROM hugues/alpinx
...

Build Requirements

• bash
• docker 1.5+

Implentation details

To build this image from scratch, a two-step process is required:

1. Build apk package(s) from source on the host

   ./apk/build.sh
   

   This is rather slow, should be fairly infrequent, and uses explicit mapping of volumes to host folders so it cannot be easily integrated in a containerized CI.

   Instead, the artifacts are stored in the repo and have to be rebuilt manually as needed.

2. Install the package(s) into a docker image

   ./build.sh

   This will build and tag huguesb/alpinx locally, instead of fetching it from Docker Hub.

   Doing the second step "right" is a little convoluted due to limitations of the docker build command. In particular, it is not possible to access files from the build context in a RUN statement. One could use a COPY statement but then the intermediate artifacts would remain in the final image even if a rm command were used in a subsequent layer.

   To be easily integrated in a containerized CI, this script eschews explicit mapping of volumes to host folders, which requires additional contorsions.