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 installe

Answer 1

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