Node:Alpine on Docker

The standard node.js Docker image is huge and includes a lot of unnecessary dependencies.

To minimize container bloat, there is the Linux Distro Alpine Linux, which is basically made to have a small footprint. This is also partly thanks to musl libc.

Alpine Dockerfile

The node alpine image is available under node:alpine.

A fairly standard Dockerfile would look something like this:

FROM node:alpine

WORKDIR /app
COPY package.json /app/package.json
RUN npm install --production
COPY server.js /app/server.js

EXPOSE 8080
CMD npm start

If you run into a problem with missing CA certificates, you can add the following to your Dockerfile:

RUN apk update && \
   apk add ca-certificates && \
   update-ca-certificates && \
   rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*