alpine-buildpack-deps

Note: this project is no longer maintained.

An attempt at a "buildpack-deps"-like Docker image with Alpine Linux

Images

The base image is the official Docker Alpine image.

This repo contains a set of images similar to the official buildpack-deps images.

Tag	Base image	Description
curl	alpine:3.x	Alpine with curl and wget
scm	:curl	:curl with source control management (SCM) tools
latest	:scm	:scm with build tools and development libraries

Caveats

• A best effort was made to find equivalent Alpine packages for the Debian packages in the official buildpack-deps. The packages may not always be 100% equivalent.
• The code you're compiling in buildpack-deps could make assumptions about the host that are not necessarily true for Alpine Linux. For example:
  • That the standard Unix tools are the GNU implementations
  • That the standard C library is glibc
  • That the paths to development files are the Debian paths
• The default/latest tag for this image is not significantly smaller than the Debian/Ubuntu-based buildpack-deps images~~, although it is roughly the same size (~190MB compressed, ~660MB uncompressed). The reason for this is that the Alpine development libraries for PostgreSQL and MySQL are significantly bigger than the Debian ones.~~ If you are hoping to make a small "buildpack-deps"-based Docker image, you're probably doing Docker images wrong.

Packages

The packages in the curl and scm variants mostly have the same names in Alpine Linux as they do in the Debian/Ubuntu source. The translation of packages for the latest image is a bit more complicated, though. The packages used are listed below.

curl

Upstream

buildpack-deps	alpine-buildpack-deps
ca-certificates	ca-certificates
curl	curl
dirmngr	gnupg
gnupg	gnupg
netbase	alpine-baselayout*
wget	busybox

Additionally, we install the tar package in the curl image. This installs the GNU version of tar, which has more features than the BusyBox tar provided with Alpine Linux. In particular, the --strip-components option only available in GNU tar is commonly used in the Docker official images when extracting source code from tarballs.

*This package is one of the base packages of Alpine Linux. It includes most of the netbase files including /etc/protocols and /etc/services.

scm

Upstream

buildpack-deps	alpine-buildpack-deps
git	git
mercurial	mercurial
openssh-client	openssh-client
procps	procps
subversion	subversion

latest

Upstream

buildpack-deps	alpine-buildpack-deps
autoconf	autoconf
automake	automake
bzip2	bzip2
dpkg-dev	dpkg, dpkg-dev
file	file
g++	g++
gcc	gcc
imagemagick	imagemagick-dev
libbz2-dev	bzip2-dev
libc6-dev	libc-dev, linux-headers
libcurl4-openssl-dev	curl-dev
libdb-dev	db-dev
libevent-dev	libevent-dev
libffi-dev	libffi-dev
libgdbm-dev	gdbm-dev
libgeoip-dev	geoip-dev
libglib2.0-dev	glib-dev
libjpeg-dev	jpeg-dev
libkrb5-dev	krb5-dev
liblzma-dev	xz-dev
libmagickcore-dev	imagemagick-dev
libmagickwand-dev	imagemagick-dev
libmysqlclient-dev	mariadb-dev*
libncurses5-dev	ncurses-dev
libncursesw5-dev	ncurses-dev
libpng-dev	libpng-dev
libpq-dev	postgresql-dev*
libreadline-dev	readline-dev
libsqlite3-dev	sqlite-dev
libssl-dev	openssl-dev/(libressl-dev)**
libtool	libtool
libwebp-dev	libwebp-dev
libxml2-dev	libxml2-dev
libxslt-dev	libxslt-dev
libyaml-dev	yaml-dev
make	make
patch	patch
unzip	busybox
xz-utils	xz
zlib1g-dev	zlib-dev

*Alpine Linux doesn't have development packages for MySQL or PostgreSQL that include only the headers/libraries necessary for client-side libraries. These Alpine packages are quite large because they include server headers/libraries as well. **Alpine Linux between versions 3.5 and 3.8 used LibreSSL. For version 3.9, they switched back to OpenSSL.