BusyBox comes in various flavors that use different implementations of libc: musl-libc (as used in Alpine), conventional glibc, and another “tiny” variant of libc called uclibc. This way, you can use BusyBox with other software that might also be linked against different libc implementations.
Debian Slim (35.9 MB)
If you use Debian as the base for your applications, the widely-used Debian Linux distribution has a minimal variant called Debian Slim. Most of what’s excluded from Slim is documentation, support for languages other than English, and some application-specific components (e.g., documentation for KDE). These omissions alone shave down the size of the Debian image by around 40%.
Another Debian-based option is Bitnami’s minideb. The images for this distribution are built nightly and contain the most recent security updates. Like Slim, it omits documentation, along with init-system-related components, but includes a custom install_packages script to allow running apt non-interactively during the container build process. The minideb image is used as the foundation for many of Bitnami’s own language runtime containers (PHP, Ruby, Node) and infrastructure applications (Redis, MariaDB).
