Daniel Nashed's Blog

Building NGINX on Redhat UBI minimal vs. Alpine

Redhat UBI minimal image

The Redhat UBI minimal is a small image with all the packages you need to run Domino.
It is smaller then the standard image and you can install additional packages to keep the image small.
The minimal image uses the micro-dnf stack, which is smaller than the yum/dnf stack used by the standard image.
Here is a blog describing the differences:

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal-base-image

Alpine Linux

But when building other applications like NGINX you have another choice. Alpine is an amazing Linux and a great base image to use.
It's not fully supporting glibc applications like Domino. But it's great for NGINX and other Linux applications.

I have written a NGINX stream module a while go which needs a matching container image with the same NGINX version.
It's a multi stage docker build where the first step builds NGINX and the stream module.
The second build stage copies it into a base container without the build environment.

When you build it on Redhat UBI minimal, the image is almost 150 MB. On Alpine Linux it's around 30 MB.
It's not just size issue. But also contains less packages with less dependencies and is also available on ARM architecture.

docker images
REPOSITORY         TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE
domino-nrpc-sni    latest   cc7fb31ff24a   10 seconds ago   29.7MB
domino-nrpc-sni    latest   faee6825892d   30 seconds ago   146MB

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