Homemade grass-fed lightweight base images for Node.js on top of Alpine Linux for super tiny secure and efficient Node.js containers.

While there are already existing Alpine Linux Node.js images, none allows us to extend them in a building context; using any Node.js module requiring compilation force us to explicitly download again all build tools and Python.

That's why we made this repo, to build an Alpine Linux Node.js Docker image including all build dependencies, where you can install modules that require compilation without extra steps.

docker build -t alpine-node --rm .

You can configure the NODE_VERSION and NPM_VERSION build arguments:

docker build -t alpine-node --rm . \
    --build-arg NODE_VERSION=4.2.6 \
    --build-arg NPM_VERSION=3

Note: NODE_VERSION have to be the exact version, while NPM_VERSION supports any npm install specification.

Here's an example Dockerfile to build a Node.js application with modules requiring compilation, on top of our base image:

FROM alpine-node:dev

RUN mkdir /app
WORKDIR /app

COPY package.json .
RUN npm install --production
COPY . .

CMD npm start