GraalVM CE on Alpine Linux

[nfrankel]

Hi,

The current GraalVM CE image is a whooping 1.56GB. I believe it a bit too much to be really used in everyday's life. I believe it could be slimmed down dramatically by FROM'ing from an Alpine Linux instead of Oracle Linux, without losing any feature.

Since this is the community edition, I think there's no licensing issue doing that. Please let me know if that should be the case.

[Djelibeybi]

Ping @mzachh to comment on why the image is so large when oraclelinux:7-slim is only 114MB, but we won't release any image that is not based on oraclelinux:7-slim.

[nfrankel]

[nfrankel]

we won't release any image that is not based on oraclelinux:7-slim

Thanks for your feedback

In that case, could you work toward a smaller image?

[mzachh]

Hi Nicolas,

thanks for your feedback. The oracle/graalvm-ce image is mostly oraclelinux, some dependencies like llvm and the graalvm-ce release archive.

The graalvm-ce release archive is currently very large, therefore the docker image is also so large. We are keeping an eye on the size and try to provide smaller images.

Please could you share more details about your use case.

I am sure you are already aware, but the "1.56GB" number is the uncompressed size. The compressed image for the download is "only" approx 550MB.

[nfrankel]

Hey Manuel,

My use-case is the following: I'm using Jekyll for my static website. It uses Ruby. Then, I'm also using PlantUML for diagrams generation, which requires Java. Finally, to minimize my final site I'm using npm and plugins.

Right now, I have a JRuby image on top of which I've manually installed Node/NPM.

I've been made aware Graal VM already has npm and Java capabilities out of the box, and can be easily plugged with Ruby. I was thinking to replace my images with Graal VM. But there's a size issue.

My bare build image that provides me npm/Ruby/Java is 186MB. The Graal VM is 1.56GB without even Ruby installed. That's too much for me. Hence, my request is to start from a leaner image, or provide a way to drastically slim down the existing one.

[deepj]

If I may add to something. I already mentioned something in oracle/truffleruby#1449 (comment)

I see you're tight a bit by Oracle politics. But to be more developer-oriented in this case. Many Ruby developers uses Alpine based Docker's images. There are tools, steps, packages and so on with Alpine Linux. JRuby offers their official Alpine based Docker's images. You would follow and respect what it is used in given community. I'm not interesting in to use Oracle Linux (don't like RHEL based distros) for development as a developer. What's on a production, it's not my business. Even Microsoft doesn't have a problem to use Alpine for their .NET platform stuffs. -> https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/dotnet/

So why not GraalVM stuffs?

BTW: I've been working on one Ruby on Rails app with Oracle DB as a database for one European bank. These things are returning back to you in the different ways than you think.