[galaxy-dev] Docker and alpine linux

Dear all,

This email is mostly to report a negative result, maybe to help others _not_ trying something.

I researched the possibility of replacing ubuntu with alpine on the Docker images (alpine seems to be used more and more on docker images, with plenty of official containers now based on it and not on debian).

The reason alpine is used, its because it generates very small containers (a bare bones one is below 10 MB). But, due the the large dependencies of galaxy, the gain is negligible. Maybe 200 MB or so. 20% is something, but not a revolution.

This being said, for servers with smaller dependencies (a mail server, web, ldap, dns...) alpine really reduces the footprint of docker containers.

Tiago