Officially support Alpine linux

[xzyfer]

What

We do not currently support Alpine Linux. It is commonly used to as a minimal base image with docker. Given the rising popularity of docker (and containerisation in general) I believe supporting Alpine Linux with a pre-built binaries is the right thing to do for the community.

Why

There is not explicit reason for us not supporting Alpine Linux, nor did make a conscious decision not to. We prebuild a "Linux" binaries which is targeted at popular distributions, namely those derived from Debian with a special consideration for CentOS 5. However that Linux is not compatible with the versions of libc(?) that ship with Alpine.

How

To achieve this we need to two things from the community.

Firstly we need a Dockerfile that when run for a given node-sass commit-ish, compiles the node-sass binary for all 32bit and 64bit version of Node 0.10, 0.12. iojs 1, iojs 2, iojs 3, Node 4, Node 5, Node 6. For reference here is the one we use for the Linux binaries

Secondly a JavaScript function that reliable detects the current OS is Alpine Linux.

[amrocha]

Hey, I'm looking into getting this done. I'm working off a version of the Dockerfile you linked. Still not sure how to detect Alpine as the current OS but I haven't thought too much about it yet.

[xzyfer]

@amrocha currently we detect the underlying OS using process.platform. This however return linux Alpine. What we need is a way to differentiate Alpine from other linux distributions. This way we can download an alpine specific binary when installing rather than the generic linux binary.

There's some background information #756 where something similar was previously discussed to distinguish between different FreeBSD binaries.

[saper]

Can somebody drop the contents of the process node variable when running node on alpine? I don't think nodejs.org provides the Alpine-based build: what kind of build are people using to run node on that platform?

[xzyfer]

@saper I've asked for help from the Twitterspehere

[amrocha]

So here's where I am:

• NVM doesn't support Alpine because it downloads pre-compiled node binaries, and Node doesn't provide Alpine binaries either;
• Alpine's package manager doesn't have IO.js or older versions of Node available as a package, and doesn't let you choose if you want the 32 bit or 64 bit version of a package so that doesn't work either;

What I'm doing right now is downloading the Node source and building it for every single version node-sass supports, but I'm having internet speed issues at home right now so I can only really get any progress done on this when I'm at work.

[xzyfer]

Thanks for looking at this. If you make the dockerfile a gist that'd be
great. If alpine doesn't official support iojs then we possibly don't need
to bother with those binaries.
On 19 Jun 2016 2:47 AM, "Andre" notifications@github.com wrote:

So here's where I am:

• NVM doesn't support Alpine because it downloads pre-compiled node
  binaries, and Node doesn't provide Alpine binaries either;
• Alpine's package manager doesn't have IO.js or older versions of
  Node available as a package, and doesn't let you choose if you want the 32
  bit or 64 bit version of a package so that doesn't work either;

What I'm doing right now is downloading the Node source and building it
for every single version node-sass supports, but I'm having internet speed
issues at home right now so I can only really get any progress done on this
when I'm at work.

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[amrocha]

Here's the dockerfile I'm using:
https://gist.github.com/amrocha/56ffd0246a8bf31b72ae4667fbd1ea99

Alpine's package manager, apm, provides the following node versions:

• 0.10
• 0.12
• 4.x
• 5.x
• 6.x

I'll try asking the maintainer for the node package if there's a way of specifying if you want the 32 or 64 bit version, but it doesn't seem like there is.