Is Alpine on server a good idea?

Hi,

I can certainly recommend Alpinelinux! I have been using Alpinelinux for about a year now and didn't find any issues so far. Alpinelinux as a micro-os proved to be stable and very easy to maintain.

You should treat Alpine als a micro-os, which means make as little changes as possible. I have a 3-page wiki with the instructions to install Alpine on my servers. This can be done in about 5 minutes. You then have very lite but capable server for running your containers.

My usage is much the same like you're planning:
- Alpine is installed on an usb-stick which is only needed at boottime, works like a charm.
- The local disks are mounted to /media/local, this is also used by docker to stores its images.
- The harddisks are formatted with btrfs, a snapshot is automatically made every day.

I am a huge fan of btrfs, I never had any issues. Also docker has a native driver for btrfs. However, I don't have any experience with drive encryption.

I currently have a couple of simple servers using Alpine but in the few month I except to migrate all my other servers to Alpinelinux too. I'm currently working hard to "dockerize" my applications.

So, in short, I use Alpinelinux for my Rapsberries al to way to my bigger RAID-6 8Tb 64Gb HP DL380p Gen8 servers.

Unfortunately I can't share my wiki but it's all very simple.
Alpine works pretty much just out-of-the box especially for docker.
That's why I use Alpine as a micro-os for docker, Alpine is perfect for this.

I did run into one issue with the elasticsearch docker container.
If you get a 'Java out of memory error' you may need to enable pax softmode.
Search for 'kernel.pax.softmode docker'
For other images it can also be necessary to disable grsec, see the last few lines in /etc/conf.d/docker

To install docker just run:

  apk add docker docker-vim docker-bash-completion

Since I run Alpine from a usb-stick all changes are lost at reboot.
That's why I have I have my disks mounted at /media/local
Homedirs are at /media/local/home and docker stores it's images at /media/local/docker

Add '--data-root=/media/local/docker' to DOCKER_OPTS in /etc/conf.d/docker
This way docker will store it images on /media/local/docker and not on the usb-stick.

docker-compose is not available as a package but you can use pip to install it.
I use the following commands to install docker-compose in the users homedir.
This way docker-compose is alway available even when I change the usb-stick.

  apk add py-pip py2-pip
  PYTHONUSERBASE=~/python pip install docker-compose --user
  echo 'export PYTHONUSERBASE=~/python' >> ~/.profile
  echo 'export PATH=~:~/python/bin' >> ~/.profile