Go and Alpine Linux

Sat, 06 Jun 2015 11:13:00 +0000

Alpine Linux is the small Linux OS everybody is using for Docker images. It is super small and has a sh*tload of packages. It’s libc is musl libc, which is different than glibc most other Linux distros are using. When deploying Go on such a image you want a truly static binary.

Building a static binary can be done with the following command (this is for SkyDNS):

% go build -ldflags "-linkmode external -extldflags -static"
# github.com/miekg/skydns
/var/tmp/go-link-FI6Ox0/000000.o: In function `_cgo_632c88804cec_C2func_getaddrinfo':
/home/miek/upstream/go/src/net/cgo_unix.go:55: warning: Using 'getaddrinfo' in
statically linked applications requires at runtime the shared libraries from the
glibc version used for linking

That ugly warning is because glibc uses nss(5) “Nameserver Service Switch” which uses dlopen(3) to dynamically load the correct resolver library. The end result is that the Go binary can’t resolve any DNS records!

Binary on Miek Gieben

Go and Alpine Linux