Is there a best practice on setting up glibc on docker alpine linux base image?

Question

Is there a best practice on setting up glibc on docker alpine linux base image with correct paths so any spawned process can correctly reference the location of the installed libc libraries?

Answer 1

Yes there is,

I've used a custom built glibc to install a JRE on it.

You can find it here

You can use wget or curl to get the code and apk to install them

UPDATED commands see comments below

apk --no-cache add ca-certificates wget
wget -q -O /etc/apk/keys/sgerrand.rsa.pub https://alpine-pkgs.sgerrand.com/sgerrand.rsa.pub
wget https://github.com/sgerrand/alpine-pkg-glibc/releases/download/2.28-r0/glibc-2.28-r0.apk
apk add glibc-2.28-r0.apk

It worked perfectly for me

Answer 2

Installing the glibc compatibility libraries has worked for me so far every time

apk add gcompat

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86_64/gcompat

Answer 3

The best practice is to not install glibc on Alpine Linux. It uses musl libc instead, a lightweight, fast, simple and standards-conform C library (i.e. everything that glibc is not).

Instead of installing glibc on Alpine, build and/or package your dependent software packages and libraries for Alpine.

• For python packages, the setup.py program will often recompile, rather than downloading a prebuild binary, when run on Alpine.

• For java, use alpine openjdk instead of Oracle.

• For faiss, and other numpy-dependent libraries in python (copied from https://gist.github.com/orenitamar/f29fb15db3b0d13178c1c4dd611adce2)

    FROM alpine:3.4
    RUN echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/main" > /etc/apk/repositories
    RUN echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/community" >> /etc/apk/repositories
    RUN apk --no-cache --update-cache add gcc gfortran python python-dev py-pip build-base wget freetype-dev libpng-dev openblas-dev
    RUN ln -s /usr/include/locale.h /usr/include/xlocale.h
    RUN pip install numpy scipy pandas matplotlib

Answer 4

I had create a github repo Docker build for glibc for alpine, support multi-arch, i.e. x86_64, aarch64, etc. You can build from the latest glibc source for any CPU type in just one line command. It was forked from sgerrand's repo, I modified to support multi-arch and combine builder stage and packaging stage into one single line. Or you could just download the pre-built packages from release page.