---
title: "Alpine Linux"
description: "1 posts about Alpine Linux, summarised, each linking to the original."
---

# Alpine Linux
> 1 posts about Alpine Linux, summarised, each linking to the original.

## Articles

### [Fly With Alpine](https://yomu.fyi/post/fly-with-alpine.md)
- Company: [Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io.md)
- Published: Dec 21, 2023
- Type: Explainer

Alpine Linux can reduce container image sizes compared with Debian slim, but switching distributions involves compatibility and ecosystem trade-offs. The post compares Fly.io’s Debian-based baseline across Bun, Node, Python, and Ruby, then reports smaller Alpine base and application images, including 304MB versus 428MB for a minimal Rails/Postgresql/esbuild application. Migration consists of changing Dockerfile base images from -slim to -alpine, replacing apt-get with apk, and reviewing package-name differences; recent Bun, Node, and Rails generators can make these changes with an --alpine option. Alpine uses musl rather than Debian’s glibc, and issues can involve DNS, missing commands or packages, precompiled binaries, insufficient testing of release candidates, and software such as Chrome. Fly.io will retain Debian as its default while keeping Alpine available.