Hi Tiago, thanks for the heads-up. I also tried alpine some time ago but Galaxy needs some external dependencies which Nate is building also with a ppa for Debian based systems. So this is not so easy to migrate. What we could do is to orchestrate the containers and its deps: https://github.com/bgruening/docker-galaxy-stable/issues/43 But this has the big disadvantages of not sharing the setup with other Galaxy installations, like the VM installation from planemo-machine. So in the end I stoped to make it more modular and tried to share as much as possible with other installations of Galaxy and move more and more into the ansible-playbook. Thanks Tiago for trying this, Bjoern Am 23.02.2016 um 05:15 schrieb Tiago Antao:
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