Image without npm nor yarn

[rubennorte]

Now that Docker supports multi-stage builds it'd be nice to have an official base image with just the Node.js binary. A build image could extend from the current images and a production image could extend from the standalone version (copying the built application with all installed dependencies from the build container).

[LaurentGoderre]

I agree but we use the official distribution which include npm. The core node doesn't have a version of node without npm, as far as I am aware.

[chorrell]

Yeah, that would be great. I think if we do that we'd have to somehow build node without npm. Or convince the build group that we need that as another option.

It might make sense to do more of a clean break and create a new node-minimal image that better fits this use case.

[rubennorte]

I just saw that https://github.com/mhart/alpine-node provides that kind of image (with the Node binary only). Maybe you can get some ideas from there.

[chorrell]

Yeah they build node with --without-npm. We could probably do the same thing but the build and release would take longer.

[pesho]

Well, theoretically we could just rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/ /usr/local/bin/npm after extracting the Node tarball. I don't see much value in pursuing that though.

[rubennorte]

@pesho I do see the value. You'd be reducing the image size by 40% (22MB from 54MB belong to npm and yarn in the Node 6.10 image). In some environments that's important.

[pesho]

@rubennorte I spoke too soon before. Indeed, there is value in having a minimal image without package managers for production.

[Starefossen]

I agree, a minimal image without npm nor yarn would be nice for production use cases. This only makes sens for the alpine variant (since the ones based on Debian are so huge anyways), and I think it can be solved as easy as rm -rf /path/to/npm.

Nice issue number #404 😜

[valeriangalliat]

I had something in mind when multi-stage builds got introduced to make the smallest possible Node image:

# Dockerfile-alpine-minimal.template
FROM node:0.0.0-alpine AS builder
FROM alpine:0.0

COPY --from=builder /usr/local/bin/node /usr/local/bin/
COPY --from=builder /usr/lib/ /usr/lib/

CMD [ "node" ]

I'm not sure if it's OK to use multi-stage builds in docker-node yet, but I like the idea of using the previously built alpine image and multi-stage builds to make the minimal version (instead of having to compile Node again).

[Daniel15]

The core node doesn't have a version of node without npm, as far as I am aware.

They used to have a statically-linked node binary that you could download just by itself with no other stuff. It looks like they only still have that for Windows (eg. https://nodejs.org/dist/v6.11.1/win-x64/node.exe), the only Linux downloads I could find still contain npm. Having said that, you could just use their Linux tarball and delete the npm directory and executable.

[chorrell]

Is this worth revisiting as a variant? Doing rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/ /usr/local/bin/npm is easy enough and it would be useful with multi-stage builds. And what would we call the variant?

[pesho]

And what would we call the variant?

A few suggestions: production, micro, tiny, nano

I like the idea in general.