Under which circumstances is it better NOT to choose alpine version of a third party docker image?

Viewed 17

I'm working on an app. My app uses Postgres. I made a docker image for my app and now I'm building a docker compose that has my-app-image and postgres images.

I noticed there's a Postgres alpine image, but all examples I see are using regular Postgres image.

I get that if I'm developing a Docker image for myapp, I might get into trouble by using alpine because some package is not available or something.

But regarding Postgres, wouldn't it be safe to assume alpine postgres works the same as regular postgres?

Why would you choose regular postgres over alpine postgres since the image is smaller and probably less resource consuming?

(I'm using postgres as an example, but I guess the question is the same for any other third party image)

1 Answers

As per my learning, I would like to add one point, Alpine uses the musl C standard library, which may introduce compatibility issues in some circumstances, but you can generally assume Alpine provides everything you need for your custom Docker images.

Related