Making the image smaller

[Makeshift]

This is an issue thread I'd like to maintain for ideas for making the image smaller. It's currently a fairly chunky 134MB, most of which is Python and its Packages.

Ideas I've tried

• Combining the sites-packages directories - Same size, much higher potential corruption possibilities
• Using pip's --no-cache-dir option - The cache dir doesn't end up in /opt/venv, so it gets deleted during the multi-stage build process anyway, so it makes no difference

Ideas I haven't tried yet

• Delete psutil earlier - This would remove the delete layer and psutil's footprint from the final image, saving about 1.5MB
• Use system packages instead of pip install - They might be smaller and faster to install? Need to check what's available in Alpine's packages
• Use a small alpine Python container and add Nginx on top of that instead - I don't think this will make much of a difference since python:alpine is already 49MB (the layer adding python+util-linux in the current Dockerfile adds 54MB, so there might be a couple of MB savings), but there might be smaller images that can be used as a base. This makes parity with nginx:alpine and Don't replace the entrypoint - add to the current one (current method breaks nginx:alpine's startup scripts) #1 more difficult though.
• Use scratch instead of Alpine - that would be a fun weekend project. It's slightly out of the realm of this repository but definitely something I want to try.
• Find a tree-shaking/bundling library - This is probably the most likely candidate, but that's based on my experience of JS, so iuno.

Current Layer Details

As of 12:47 12/09/22, makeshift27015/nginx-alpine-amplify:latest on amd64 looks like this, according to dive:

According to Dive, there's 2.6 MB we could potentially recover, but I think in practice that would be difficult. Most of the files that are being replaced between the base nginx:alpine layer and the apk add layer are python dependencies that get updated during install, eg ca-certificates and the Alpine installed db which I doubt I could do anything with. I could stop apk from updating these, but they're kinda nice to have up to date anyway.

The easiest option would be to recover as much of this 2.6 MB as possible would be to create another stage based on alpine:latest and simply copy / from the (current) final stage, but that's dirty as hell for 2.6MB and probably wouldn't recover that much because most of those files will exist in the base alpine image also.

Please reply with more ideas :)