Benedikt Lang

golang-alpine - Build golang binaries for alpine linux

Since alpine linux and therefor gliderlabs/alpine docker containers use musl instead of gnu libc your golang binaries will not work inside alpine.

There are two ways you can fix this:

Static linking

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -a -installsuffix cgo

Use this docker image

Use this docker image to build your binary, check the usage below.

Using gliderlabs/alpine it is possible to create an image similiar to golang with only 204MB.

You can pull it from docker hub: docker pull blang/golang-alpine

Usage

Use this container to build your project binary and copy it to your production alpine container.

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/go/src/github.com/yourname/yourrepo -w /go/src/github.com/yourname/yourrepo blang/golang-alpine go build -v

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/go/bin blang/golang-alpine go get github.com/yourname/yourrepo

Dockerfile

The dockerfile is quite simple:

FROM gliderlabs/alpine
MAINTAINER Benedikt Lang <mail@blang.io>
RUN apk-install bash go bzr git mercurial subversion openssh-client ca-certificates 

RUN mkdir -p /go/src /go/bin && chmod -R 777 /go
ENV GOPATH /go
ENV PATH /go/bin:$PATH
WORKDIR /go

Limitations

This process depends on the golang port for alpine linux. The base golang image is build from source and comes in different versions properly tagged.

A better solution to build this image would be a compilation of the golang sources, but there are problems i was not able to solve:

  • Alpine uses musl libc, Base image gnu libc
  • You can’t copy go binaries build on ubuntu, because of musl
  • I could not build go using musl because of build errors