[jpallen]

Nice post, and very close to my experiences with Dockerfiles for node.

To the author: could you elaborate on the differences between carbon and alpine base images please? I can obviously go look this up, but this was the one part of the guide that was new to me. Your description wasn't enough to give me a complete understanding, so perhaps you could explain a bit more about carbon and alpine? Thanks.

[praveenweb]

carbon is the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version of Node. Instead of using the latest version, which can have breaking changes and possible drop of support in the future, it is recommended to use LTS version just to ensure using a stable + well supported version. alpine base images are generally used to cut down the image size for production, because they are very minimal and works well for most use-cases. But you would generally use carbon or specific full blown version of node in development, because you can install system dependencies for bundling code.

[jpallen]

Thanks! You've given me something new to try out :)