On fedora, you can do something like mkdir /tmp/myimage dnf --releasever=23 --installroot=/tmp/myimage install <package-name> rm -rf /tmp/myimage/var/cac

On fedora, you can do something like mkdir /tmp/myimage dnf --releasever=23 --installroot=/tmp/myimage install <package-name> rm -rf /tmp/myimage/var/cache/dnf tar zcvf - /tmp/myimage | docker import - myimage Gives you an image that is ~30M (15M compressed) plus the size of whatever package you are installing. The advantage is that you get access to Fedora's package database with security updates. This could probably be slimmed down further with custom versions of the base packages.