This repository contains Dockerfiles for ficusio/node-alpine image, which is ~33MB in virtual size.

node-alpine:latest, node-alpine:5.7, node-alpine:5

This image contains Node.js v5.7 and NPM v3.7. It is based on Alpine linux, which, despite being a very lightweight distribution, provides apk package manager, allowing easy installation of many pre-built packages.

node-alpine:onbuild, node-alpine:5.7-onbuild, node-alpine:5-onbuild

This is an extended version of node-alpine, with added ONBUILD triggers (similar to and inspired by google/nodejs-runtime image). These triggers execute on each build of a derived image, and perform two tasks:

• Copy everything from the directory containing Dockerfile to the /app directory inside the container, but skip node_modules directory and all files/dirs listed in the .dockerignore file;
• Install NPM-managed dependencies; reuse Docker image cache if dependencies have not changed since previous build.

This allows Dockerfiles of derived images to contain less boilerplate instructions:

FROM ficusio/node-alpine:5-onbuild
EXPOSE 8080
# This will be performed automatically:
# WORKDIR /app
# COPY . /app
# npm install --production
# CMD ["node", "index.js"]

The image's Dockerfile contains comments that explain all steps performed by these triggers. There is also an example application which uses this image as a base.

Known problems

There is an issue with Node.js/Docker combination which prevents Node from exiting on INT and TERM signals when it runs inside a Docker container. It can be worked around by manually handling these signals in the app, which is a useful thing anyway:

exitOnSignal('SIGINT');
exitOnSignal('SIGTERM');

function exitOnSignal(signal) {
  process.on(signal, function() {
    console.log('\ncaught ' + signal + ', exiting');
    // perform all required cleanup
    process.exit(1);
  });
}

Contributing

PRs and issues are welcome!

Updating Node.js and/or NPM version

• Edit base/Dockerfile and change NODEJS_VERSION, NODEJS_SHA256 and NPM_VERSION variables.
• If you've changed major or patch version of Node, edit .tags file to reflect this change. Then, update FROM instruction in onbuild/Dockerfile to match the new $major.$minor tag.

Building

1. To build new version, run ./make build. It will build new base and onbuild variations and tag them as $image:$variation-build, where $image comes from the .image file.

2. To tag images built in the previous step, run ./make tag. It will tag each $image:$variation-build image as $image:$tag-$variation, for each $tag listed in the .tags file. The exception to this rule is base variation, which gets tagged as $image:$tag.

3. To push images tagged in step 2, run ./make push. You'll need push access to the $image Docker Hub repository.

To perform all these steps at once, run ./make all.