We’re big fans of both Node.js and Docker at Atlassian, and Bitbucket has seen some great adoption among these communities. So when we were recently contacted by the maintainers of the node-docker project to see whether Bitbucket Pipelines could support their Docker image, based on Alpine Linux, we immediately went to investigate and see what we could do.
Alpine is a very lightweight Linux distribution that weighs in at an insanely small 5 MB, so using it in your build can shave a significant amount off the download and startup time. However, Alpine was incompatible with Pipelines because we had a dependency on the bash shell.
Bitbucket Pipelines was originally designed to require bash, which isn’t included in Alpine. But with a few tweaks on our side, we now fall back to using /bin/sh when /bin/bash isn’t available. These changes allow customers to use any Alpine-based image for their build container in Pipelines.
Now all Bitbucket Pipelines users can get the speed benefits of using any Docker image based on Alpine, including many of the official Docker images that started transitioning last year. We hope you enjoy this improvement as much as we do!
Haven’t tried Bitbucket Pipelines?
Bitbucket Pipelines is a continuous delivery service built right within Bitbucket so you can code, test, and deploy from a single tool with a unified workflow. There’s no need to switch to another application, no need to juggle permissions and access, or setup servers – just use Bitbucket Pipelines and get unlimited concurrent builds.
Cheers, the Bitbucket Pipelines team
