I noticed that the official images for nodebb are built on the default node images which are built on debian. This produces rather large images. For example the v1.12.1 build is 1.39gb. I built the 1.12.x branch off of the alpine image and it is 569mb in size.

Is there a reason that we aren't using alpine by default for the official images? Would it be possible to publish both debian based and alpine based official images? It seems like it would be easy to just keep a parallel Dockerfile for alpine and build and distribute both images.

@mat-m is spot on, though my perspective is definitely production, not test. Running the leanest container possible has the added benefit of reducing the attack vectors as there is simply less surface for somebody to target. Alpine is specifically designed to be as lightweight as possible and as stripped down as possible.

Do we know who owns the image build process and can s/he weigh in on this?