Alpine - not for Servers
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- Offline
- 2 years 6 months ago
- 2015-09-14
I've been playing around with Alpine quite a bit in the last few days, though only in VMs and containers.
I have to say that I like it a lot for its simplicity and great package manager so I was considering to use it in my next project to replace a small office server offering Soft RAID, Samba, Dovecot, and maybe some other services.
Having tested it thoroughly in the VM, I am sure that Alpine is perfectly capable of handling these services.
But for the first time I read a bit more about Alpine here on the website and also on third party pages, and I have to say I'm a bit confused. Many articles speak of Alpine being an OS for routers and firewalls, the official information speaks about desktop systems, development boxes and virtual servers on top of that. But nowhere is it mentioned that Alpine should be used as a server OS.
So, I was just wondering if anyone could tell me if there is a good reason why I should not consider Alpine for my next server project?
Thanks
I'm currenltly using AlpineLinux as server OS and I'm very happy with it...
I was coming from the Debian world...
Thanks jch
I'm using Alpine for a LEMP server running Wordpress, I like it quite a bit.
MariaDB + nginx + php-fpm also as a DNS server with dnscrypt-proxy and Unbound
I hopped around quite a bit before that, using CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian. I think I like Alpine more and I'm happy with the performance and low RAM usage.
As long as it has what you need in the repos I can heartily recommend Alpine as a server
I've switched a server from Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Alpine and have found that Alpine works beautifully at hosting both services on it as well as docker containers (using an Alpine base image to keep it minimal :)).
Coming from a Gentoo background I had a good deal of exposure to configuring everything at the low level... and seeing openrc in Alpine makes that much better (disliked the mess of /etc/rc.* directories that Ubuntu used).