Tiny containers (with Alpine)

⬅️ FEM Docker

Swap the Linux distribution to Alpine (decreasing our container size from 913MB to 86MB):

FROM node:12-alpine

• Alpine is a bare bones alternative to Ubuntu. It’s built on Busybox Linux which is a 2MB distro of Linux (Alpine is 5MB.) node:12-alpine itself is about 80MB and node:latest is about 908MB.

Creating your own alpine container

To create your own Alpine container, create a my-node.Dockerfile:

FROM alpine:3.10
 
# uses the Alpine package manager to grab Node.js and npm
RUN apk add --update nodejs npm
 
# or
 
RUN apk add --update nodejs-current npm
 
RUN addgroup -S node && adduser -S node -G node
 
USER node
 
RUN mkdir /home/node/code
 
WORKDIR /home/node/code
 
COPY --chown=node:node package-lock.json package.json ./
 
RUN npm ci
 
COPY --chown=node:node . .
 
CMD ["node", "index.js"]
 
# to run (-f is file)
docker build -t my-node -f my-node.Dockerfile .

Multi-stage builds

We know it’s multi-stage because it has two FROM instructions

# build stage
FROM node:12-stretch
WORKDIR /build
COPY package-lock.json package.json ./
RUN npm ci
COPY . .
 
# runtime stage
FROM alpine:3.10
RUN apk add --update nodejs
RUN addgroup -S node && adduser -S node -G node
USER node
RUN mkdir /home/node/code
WORKDIR /home/node/code
 
# copy from the first stage
COPY --from=0 --chown=node:node /build .
CMD ["node", "index.js"]
 
# to run
docker build -t multi-node -f multi-node.Dockerfile .
docker run -p 3000:3000 multi-node

A static project with create-react-app, typescript and nginx

npx --ignore-existing create-react-app static-assets-project --template typescript --use-npm. 

And the dockerfile

FROM node:latest
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN npm ci && npm run build
 
# you could totally use nginx:alpine here too
FROM nginx:latest
COPY --from=0 /app/build /usr/share/nginx/html
 
# to run
docker build -t static-app .
docker run -p 8080:80 static-app