Same here. It's a great base image for node projects.
the Node 19 release alpine image is ~175mb, the same release on debian (bullseye) is roughly 1gb (998mb). Still ~80MB smaller than the bullseye-slim release (247mb).
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That said - if the ask was for using it as a daily driver on a machine (primary OS), I'd probably still pick a more fully featured distro (ex: my daily driver is Arch, not Alpine). The available packages and tooling in Alpine aren't really geared towards daily use as an OS, although some folks definitely do it.
My guess is the most weight is probably coming from linux-headers (~10mb), python3 (~50mb), and nodejs (~60mb). Plus 1 to 10 mb for each of the other pacakges, and you end up right there around 175mb.
Yeah, I looked again and it looks like they're actually only pulling those packages in when they need to build node for the current ARCH. (that's what I get for just scanning to the first call to apk add)
They also appear to be cleaning them up, so I'm not actually sure where all that extra weight is coming from.
Node itself is fairly trimmed down in the packages for alpine (40MB installed), but they're not using that package, they're pulling in their own version from their download sources - so it's possible they're including a lot of extra junk there. They also add yarn which is another 10mb.
But in general - I agree, there's about 100mb of weight I can't actually explain in that image from a very quick look.
the Node 19 release alpine image is ~175mb, the same release on debian (bullseye) is roughly 1gb (998mb). Still ~80MB smaller than the bullseye-slim release (247mb).
---
That said - if the ask was for using it as a daily driver on a machine (primary OS), I'd probably still pick a more fully featured distro (ex: my daily driver is Arch, not Alpine). The available packages and tooling in Alpine aren't really geared towards daily use as an OS, although some folks definitely do it.