Question: Official node alpine image

[styfle]

First of all, great job with this image! It made node microservices + docker make sense! And I know it takes a lot of work to maintain this so thanks! 🎉

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Now that the official node image has an alpine variant docker-node/pull/156

1. Are there any differences between this and the official docker node image?
2. If they are the same, do you plan to continue supporting this image or eventually tell people to migrate to the official?

[ckeeney]

I would like to see an official answer from @mhart here, but here he does encourage an organization to move to the official node alpine image.

I think lots of deployments rely on this image, so it's hard to stop support for this repo without having something in place for those people, maybe even just a deprecation period. On the other hand, I don't think there is a good reason to start a NEW project based on this image, and I think people should look to moving at some point.

[waleedsamy]

I think you should go with the official image, specially for fast security fixes release like this one here.

~$ docker run -it node:7-alpine sh
/ # node -v
v7.10.1
/ # exit
~$ docker run -it mhart/alpine-node:7 sh
/ # node -v
v7.10.0
/ # exit

[mhart]

@waleedsamy that's quite disingenuous – the latest 8.x, 6.x and 4.x mhart/alpine-node images were updated 4.5 hours before the official images:

$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' mhart/alpine-node:8.1.4
"2017-07-11T18:09:50.754005426Z"

$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' node:8.1.4-alpine
"2017-07-11T22:41:26.857142679Z"

It's true that Node.js 7.x was not updated on alpine-node (nor was Node.js 5.x) – it hasn't been supported since June and you should have upgraded all your instances to 8.x. Node.js 7 was never an LTS release – you can see the LTS support timeline here:

https://github.com/nodejs/LTS

[waleedsamy]

@mhart you are right, mhart/alpine-node get updated couple of hours before the official images.

waleeds-MacBook-Pro-2:~ waleed$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' mhart/alpine-node:8
"2017-07-11T18:09:50.754005426Z"
$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' node:8-alpine
"2017-07-11T22:41:26.857142679Z"
$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' mhart/alpine-node:6
"2017-07-11T18:35:55.648532378Z"
$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' node:6-alpine
"2017-07-11T23:17:41.201974341Z"
$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' mhart/alpine-node:4
"2017-07-11T18:51:44.583266214Z"
waleeds-MacBook-Pro-2:~ waleed$ docker inspect --format '{{json .Created}}' node:4-alpine
"2017-07-11T23:27:18.649119102Z"

but isn't it better if you provided this kind of security fixes to 7.x too (the official image had the fix for this version, although it is not TLS).

[mhart]

@waleedsamy I had removed the 7.x tags from the README and hub.docker.com description a while ago, so no one should be installing it anymore.

I'm happy to update it if you need it, but I am wondering who would be using 7.x in production (and why, considering it was never intended to be stable)?

[waleedsamy]

I discovered I had some docker images running on production based on 7.x image, I updated it to 8.x so I think it's not high priority anymore.

[mhart]

Ah, well I updated them on the weekend anyway 😸 – so you're safe either way 👍

[Frodox]

Bump thread :) Hello @mhart and thank you!

• do you do regular cve-fixes for images (at least LTS-ones) ? I see official images was updated 2 days ago, and your one - 2 months ago. But I don't see official changelog and do not if it actually needed ;)
• do you plan to continue supporting this image or eventually tell people to migrate to the official?

[csillag]

@mhart could you please share with us your current perspective on this issue? Thanks.