Need a light weight container with Linux_x86-64

Greetings…

I’ve been looking for a light weight Linux container of Linux_x86_64. Tried alpine, but it is of “musl-linux-amd64”. Not sure what’s the difference, but it’s not compatible with the software I need to install, i.e. MQClient.

It works on Ubuntu, but it’s too heavy, with too many packages I don’t really need. I wonder who would run a Ubuntu Desktop on a container.

Is there a stripped down Ubuntu container image? I’m also consider build one from scratch, but couldn’t find a document how to do it beyond a “Hello” container.

thanks for any insight.

Ubuntu and Debian-Slim images have a size pf roughly 25mb on Dockerhub and are extrected on the host to something between 60 and 70mb. Of couse this is still like 10 to 15 times the size of the alpine image.

You can use debootstrap (see: https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/baseimages/) to create your own base image, though it will take ages until you manage to create a base image that is smaller than the Ubuntu or Debian-Slim images.

Thank you Metin.

so I must be pulling the heavier images. my ubuntu 14.04 is 188MB, 16.04 is 124MB, but surprisingly 18.04 is only 64MB, though still quite large.

On the contrary, the splytechio/debian-slim-node:latest image is over 400MB. So I must be looking at the wrong image?

try those:
debian:stretch-slim
debian:sid-slim
ubuntu:bionic

The official images are well optimized. There is no need to look for any unofficial images like splytechio/debian-slim-node:latest.

Thank you Metin, it seems ubuntu 18.04 is the lightest image, with 64MB. I better go with the official ubuntu image.

The next thing to consider is that you build your images as much as possible in the same way. Every command in the Dockerfile creates a new layer and if these layers are the same in different images they are shared and the space is used only once. It is possible that you have 3 images with 100 MB each but they only use 150 MB on your system.

How about BusyBox, CirrOS or Container Linux aka CoreOS?

Never heard of CirrOS before. The image size is intriguing and close to alpine, though a version sub 1.0 would stop me from using it - or at least run extensive tests…