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Lightweight Alpine VMs on macOS
- ge96 4y agoIf they can get VSCode to work on musl that'd be greaaaat.
- boomanaiden154 4y agoVSCode (and Electron) has been working for a while on Alpine Linux. https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/testing/x86_64/code-oss https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/testing/x86_64/cod...
- ge96 4y agoI forgot to mention arm Edit: which... Might also be available?
- boomanaiden154 4y agoAlso available, at least if your hardware is aarch64. We've had some issues getting Chromium working on some of the other arm versions Alpine supports. https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/testing/aarch64/code-oss https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/testing/aarch64/co...
- ge96 4y agoOh man that's great, that was my only gripe at the time. Thanks for the links.
- mberning 4y agoThe container landscape is getting crowded. As a person who just wants to get things done with containers it’s not immediately obvious where I should be focusing my efforts due to the proliferation of “container solutions”. It seems especially bad on the mac right now.
- idontwantthis 4y agoI think you'd need a particular reason to not use Docker.
- xmonkee 4y agoI do have a particular reason - memory use. I am running postgres and redis locally for dev work, but I would love to use Docker so that I can standardize it for my team, but it just takes up to much ram on m1.
- idontwantthis 4y agoI don't mean to sound flippant, but that sounds like you're using a computer for business that can't handle the work you are trying to do. If 32/64GB isn't enough memory then yeah, I guess you need something else, but if your machine has less than that then it sounds like you need to buy the right computer for the job. Also, are you using AMD or ARM images for those?
- sqlcommando 4y agoI dunno about the m1 aspect of this but postgres and redis for typical dev work shouldn't require more than a gigabyte or two of RAM when running together. 32-64GB is more like heavy traffic enterprise DB territory...
- dijit 4y agoguess the parent is annoyed at spending 2-3GiB of ram on the VM itself. even if the containers themselves only use 128MiB total: the VM will cordon off everything it's told to; which most people are unlikely to change until there's an issue, and is configurable down to 1GiB as a minimum. FWIW Docker Desktop on my machine (M2 Macbook Air; 24GiB Ram) defaulted to using 8GiB of RAM.
- rch 4y agoThey're also trivial to install without virtualization. Postgres has been one of the first things I install on a new laptop for over a decade now.
- reversethread 4y agoI don't see the point of a dedicated tool for this when it is easy enough just to start a Alpine docker container with a couple commands. As this project is just a wrapper for docker and LXD[1] and those tools are already easy enough for the average SWE to interact with, the project seems to just over-complicate an already existing workflow. [1] https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine#motivation https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine#motivation
- MBCook 4y agoSo the automatic port forwarding/FS sharing/networking is nice if you want that. But I often don’t. When I’m using Docker on my Mac it’s usually because I’m trying to use Docker. I need to use an existing Docker container or build a new one to fit some purpose with a Dockerfile. I guess it’s nice that there would be a simpler way to launch one-off containers or containers for myself that aren’t expected to work like every other Docker container. Is this a common need? Is there something that makes this more than I’ve noticed? The fact I work in a “Docker for containers” place may be preventing me from seeing what would make this shine.
- coderintherye 4y agoThere's related discussion from earlier today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33762657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33762657 for LXD
- deafpolygon 4y agoThis is your typical MacOS frenzy over solutions in search of a problem space that didn't need solving.
- phplovesong 4y agoSo just like the blockchain?
- deafpolygon 4y agoshrug.. I don't care about blockchain
- Sirened 4y agoit's a thin wrapper around qemu, for those interested
- joshmn 4y agoNice wrapper around qemu for those wondering. As someone with MacAlpine heritage I have never been more disappointed in two letters, though.
- smcleod 4y agoI'm really not a fan of that docs website/static page generator - or maybe it's the way the content has been laid out - it shouldn't take so many clicks and full screen refreshes to get basic information that could each be a heading on a single page so you can grep for words, use the mouse less etc....
- samwillis 4y agoI think they have split it into far too many small pages, the whole CLI section should be one page, if not the whole lot. Slight aside though, they have used the Material theme for MKDocs, which is much more than a theme, it's a whole extension package of bells a whistles for MKDocs. I'm not actually too keen on "Material for MKDocs" [0], I like all the clever plugins, but the theme itself I find distracting and too "loud". The theme jumps out more than the content itself. In the Python ecosystem Material for MKDocs seems to be the leading default at the moment, however I much prefer Furo for Sphinx, it's much cleaner, it's about putting the content front and centre. It does also have a similar set of plugins for Sphinx adding those bells and whistles. 0: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ 1: https://pradyunsg.me/furo/ https://pradyunsg.me/furo/
- squidfunk 4y agoAuthor of Material for MkDocs here. I totally understand that some people don't like Material Design, as it's just everywhere nowadays and can be considered a bit overused. However, with little effort, you can adjust the style of Material for MkDocs with a few lines of additional CSS [0] and fit it to your taste. For example, several days ago I did this [1] in 20min. Nevertheless, Furo is an awesome theme if you like to use Sphinx over MkDocs! [0]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/customization/#additional-css https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/customization/#a... [1]: https://twitter.com/squidfunk/status/1598341366869856257/photo/1 https://twitter.com/squidfunk/status/1598341366869856257/pho...
- dindresto 4y agoIs there any containerd solution for macOS that makes use of the Rosetta binary provided to Linux VM's for x86 containers yet?
- LAC-Tech 4y agoLove Alpine Linux. Only thing stopping me from running it on my main workstation is that my Sublime Text is my main editor and they have no musl version.
- sphinxster 4y agoHave you tried these options for running glibc software on Alpine? https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Running_glibc_programs https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Running_glibc_programs
- rollcat 4y agoYou can install glibc+support libs on Alpine to run third-party software, but YMMV - I've had very mixed results.
- gabrielgio 4y agoI'm using Alpine as my main workstation, and for those situation (like for Slack) I use flatpak.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoGuess I'm already using flatpak for a few packages on my current glibc distro. Not that elegant but better than nothing.
- m000 4y agoI like the concept of having a musl-based distro, but the utility of Alpine is frankly limited at the moment. Sublime is just one case. We had a Python service running in an Alpine container because it was thought as "mean and lean" by someone. Sound choice, right? Guess what: we used a handful of (popular) Python modules that are backed by native libraries and PyPi didn't have musl-linked versions for them. The "mean and lean" Alpine-based image ended up weighing more than a debian-slim-based image.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoI had Alpine running on WSL as my main dev environment for a long time. I've heard the python issues before, but I can confirm node.js stuff all worked flawlessly. IIRC npm will compile native extensions, sounds like PyPi (is that a package manager?) distributes binaries.
- encryptluks2 4y agoThis is like the 5th or 6th frontpage macOS container strategy this week. Wouldn't it be better to have native containers by just using Linux? What advantage do people get hy using macOS?
- lars512 4y agoMacOS contains tons of nice usability as a working environment, and even has great rolling package management with Homebrew, but the lack of native containers is the single biggest downside, basically preventing us from using containers more extensively at my work. The blocker for us is data work that needs a lot of memory locally, meaning it wouldn't work for us to allocate it to a VM for containers.
- rollcat 4y ago> What advantage do people get hy using macOS? The question applies both ways: what advantage (other than native container support) do I get by running Linux? Personally I would love to see OCI containers supported natively on other operating systems. Currently you get the same VM crapshow on e.g. OpenBSD, except the community is several orders of magnitude smaller, so you don't even get prepackaged solutions.
- encryptluks2 4y agoI get the advantage of transparent source code, a vibrant community supporting amazing projects, first-class support for new concepts and features. > Personally I would love to see OCI containers supported natively on other operating systems. Currently you get the same VM crapshow on e.g. OpenBSD, except the community is several orders of magnitude smaller, so you don't even get prepackaged solutions. Talk to your OS vendor. They are the ones who are preventing this from working.
- rollcat 4y agoI find it odd that you used both "it's a community project" and "talk to your vendor" in the same reply to address the same concern.
- ofrzeta 4y agoI have a Macbook Air M1 but I have given up on running x86 containers. Too much hassle, to much diskspace consumed and too slow. I can run various web projects natively but when I need x86 containers I use a x86 notebook with Linux.