I use it for Node all the time. There are published docker images with Alpine as the base and just Node and any required packages installed. I've had to manually install a handful of libraries to support image processing, or anything else that NPM might not install itself.
horsawlarway|3 years ago
the Node 19 release alpine image is ~175mb, the same release on debian (bullseye) is roughly 1gb (998mb). Still ~80MB smaller than the bullseye-slim release (247mb).
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That said - if the ask was for using it as a daily driver on a machine (primary OS), I'd probably still pick a more fully featured distro (ex: my daily driver is Arch, not Alpine). The available packages and tooling in Alpine aren't really geared towards daily use as an OS, although some folks definitely do it.
lxgr|3 years ago
Given the size of Alpine itself (less than 10 MB, last time I checked), is it node that pulls in so much extra stuff, or something else?