Contents

General

I have used Progrium’s excellent BusyBox image as the base of my minicontainers for quite some time. Recently it seems that the upstream changes cause all the packages installed with the opkg package manager it uses to fail as OpenWRT switched to musl.

Easiest way forward is to switch to using Alpine as it also has a minimal size.

Package manager

Alpine uses uses apk as the package management tool instead of opkg that progrium’s BusyBox image used. It seems that apk package are maintained quite well and all the packages I have needed so far are there.

Running Java on Alpine

When I earlier tried out Alpine I ran into problems when trying to run Oracle Java 8 on it. Things have progressed since then and people like Vlad Frolov have managed to get the Oracle JDK 8 to run. The image is called frol/docker-alpine-oraclejdk8 and I’m switching to using it as the base for the minicontainers as it seems to be updated regularly and there is no reason for me to duplicate the effort done by Vlad.

Next steps

I’ll immediately convert all my images to use Alpine as the base as at the moment most of them won’t build as they try to install wget with https support and as that package doesn’t run, the build fails.