Reducing The Size Of Alpine Docker Images

1 minute read Published:

Why the heck is my alpine docker image so huge?

That’s a tough question to answer, especially when you have no idea what’s taking up all of the space.

This is a dirty little one-liner that yields a sorted list of all of the packages on your alpine image by size. It does this by

  • Getting the complete list from apk info
  • Iterating over the results to ask apk for its size
  • Removing the blank lines
  • Combining the size lines and the name lines
  • Sorting by size
apk info | while read a; do apk info -s $a; done | awk NF | sed 'Ns/\n/ /' | sort -k4 -n

It may be ugly, but now I can make an informed decision about wether or not there are binaries that can be axed.