Comparing Linux Distributions in Docker

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 07:12:23 +0000

I have the situation where I need to compare packages, settings, configurations across multiple Linux distributions. Docker is a great tool to pull images from all of the linux distributions to compare and contrast nearly anything you can think of. In this post we’ll create a simple docker compose file and run containers from the centos, alpine, ubuntu, archlinux, busybox and debian images.

The docker-compose.yaml file

First we’ll need to install docker-ce and docker-compose. Then create a simple docker-compose.yaml with the following content:

version: '3'
services:
 ubuntu:
 container_name: ubuntu
 image: ubuntu:latest
 command: tail -f /dev/null

 centos:
 container_name: centos
 image: centos:latest
 command: tail -f /dev/null

 busybox:
 container_name: busybox
 image: busybox:latest
 command: tail -f /dev/null

 alpine:
 container_name: alpine
 image: alpine:latest
 command: tail -f /dev/null

 archlinux:
 container_name: arch
 image: archlinux:latest
 command: tail -f /dev/null

 debian:
 container_name: debian
 image: debian:latest
 command: tail -f /dev/null

Virtualization on Lloyd Rochester's Geek Blog

Comparing Linux Distributions in Docker

The docker-compose.yaml file