Consider other base images

[hexylena]

Specifically I'd like to consider alpine linux which I recently heard about

Rationale:

• By using a tiny, tiny base image, we can pack a lot more useful stuff inside a the same network/harddisk cost to our end users.
• We could produce two images, a default version with the same packages as currently available and a fraction of the size, and then a -full version with everything you could possibly want for bioinformatics that would probably still be less the the current image size.

[hexylena]

Played around with alpine today. Closing for now as this would conflict with the move to jupyter as python3 isn't supported on alpine yet. They additionally are missing other packages that just make life so much easier like pandoc

[bgruening]

Thanks @erasche

[hexylena]

alpine has py3, re-opening, will re-try. I've built a number of images from alpine and it's actually pretty stellar for small + fast builds.

[dominicfollett]

@erasche Have you had luck with using Jupyter Notebook on Alpine linux? I'd be interested to know what your results were like.

[hexylena]

@dominicfollett have not tried yet, my PI reallocated my time away from galaxy efforts temporarily.

[dominicfollett]

I'm going to give it a go this weekend, will let you know if I have any success. I did note however that Docker is moving over to Alpine which is quite promising.

[bgruening]

@dominicfollett this image is kind of deprecated as Galaxy is moving on to the Jupyter based image: https://github.com/bgruening/docker-jupyter-notebook
This image is even bigger because we have installed a lot of languages with a base sci-stack into it.