Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

📝 Add note to discourage Alpine with Python #247

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Oct 2, 2021
Merged

📝 Add note to discourage Alpine with Python #247

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
25 changes: 24 additions & 1 deletion README.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -4,10 +4,15 @@

* [`python3.9`, `latest` _(Dockerfile)_](https://github.com/tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask-docker/blob/master/docker-images/python3.9.dockerfile)
* [`python3.8`, _(Dockerfile)_](https://github.com/tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask-docker/blob/master/docker-images/python3.8.dockerfile)
* [`python3.8-alpine` _(Dockerfile)_](https://github.com/tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask-docker/blob/master/docker-images/python3.8-alpine.dockerfile)
* [`python3.7`, _(Dockerfile)_](https://github.com/tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask-docker/blob/master/docker-images/python3.7.dockerfile)
* [`python3.6` _(Dockerfile)_](https://github.com/tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask-docker/blob/master/docker-images/python3.6.dockerfile)

## Discouraged tags

* [`python3.8-alpine` _(Dockerfile)_](https://github.com/tiangolo/uwsgi-nginx-flask-docker/blob/master/docker-images/python3.8-alpine.dockerfile)

To learn more about why Alpine images are discouraged for Python read the note at the end: [🚨 Alpine Python Warning](#-alpine-python-warning).

## Deprecated

These tags are no longer supported:
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -915,6 +920,24 @@ flask run --host=0.0.0.0 --port=80

You will see your Flask debugging server start, you will see how it sends responses to every request, you will see the errors thrown when you break your code, and how they stop your server, and you will be able to re-start it very fast, by just running the command above again.

## 🚨 Alpine Python Warning

In short: You probably shouldn't use Alpine for Python projects, instead use the `slim` Docker image versions.

---

Do you want more details? Continue reading 👇

Alpine is more useful for other languages where you build a static binary in one Docker image stage (using multi-stage Docker building) and then copy it to a simple Alpine image, and then just execute that binary. For example, using Go.

But for Python, as Alpine doesn't use the standard tooling used for building Python extensions, when installing packages, in many cases Python (`pip`) won't find a precompiled installable package (a "wheel") for Alpine. And after debugging lots of strange errors you will realize that you have to install a lot of extra tooling and build a lot of dependencies just to use some of these common Python packages. 😩

This means that, although the original Alpine image might have been small, you end up with a an image with a size comparable to the size you would have gotten if you had just used a standard Python image (based on Debian), or in some cases even larger. 🤯

And in all those cases, it will take much longer to build, consuming much more resources, building dependencies for longer, and also increasing its carbon footprint, as you are using more CPU time and energy for each build. 🌳

If you want slim Python images, you should instead try and use the `slim` versions that are still based on Debian, but are smaller. 🤓

## Tests

All the image tags, configurations, environment variables and application options are tested.
Expand Down