Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.
All tags for this image are Edge builds of Alpine Linux. They differ only in which repositories are included. If you need a stable version, alpine provides tags for those. As the intent of this image is to be a minimal base for single-service containers, tracking edge is not expected to cause issues (packages are still stable releases, only Alpine itself is a development build).
Starting in 2.1.0, package is included in this image, and apk-install is deprecated. apk-install will be removed in 3.x.
owner is included with this image. The ~800 bytes it adds to the image is a fair trade for the debugging time saved when you need it.
(deprecated) apk-install simplifies the "Fetch Cache", "Install Package", "Empty Cache" flow to a single step: apk-install package.
package replaces apk-install, serving the same purpose, but providing a generic interface across package management tools.
latesttracks theedgetag from upstream
This includes the main, testing, and community repositories, but all packages outside main are masked. To import them, just use apk add package@tag.