Make Alpine-based images

[DavidBruant]

Docker is moving all the official images to Alpine as base distro. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000827 Example for Ruby

There are various efforts that do that for Node:

• https://github.com/mhart/alpine-node
• https://blog.risingstack.com/minimal-docker-containers-for-node-js/

but I don't see official images. I'd be cool if NodeSource provided official alpine-based images. Thanks :-)

[retrohacker]

Thank you for the well thought out issue @DavidBruant :smile:,

A minimal Node.js container is absolutely on our radar, and has been for quite some time.

• We are actively involved in the Alpine Linux discussion with the Docker Working Group: https://github.com/nodejs/docker-node/issues/46
• We have been working as early as November 2014 to bring minimal distributions of Linux into this repo: https://github.com/nodesource/docker-node-legacy/issues/14

The issue is stability. This repo is designed with production use in mind, and I assert that the images we provide will be stable in production. I can't make the same assertion about Alpine and similar distributions yet. In fact, dante was built in preparation for the release of a minimal distribution so we can certify its stability before shipping.

ncopa landed two pull requests recently that are great steps forward in this initiative.

• https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/5099
• https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/5056

In regards to the hacker news link: https://github.com/nodejs/docker-node/issues/46#issuecomment-178168365

Althogh I can't give a timeline yet, I hope that this issue shows that a minimal Docker image is not absent from this repo for lack of trying!