Alpine Linux support is here

By Tugdual Saunier, on Mar 30, 2017

We received a lot of requests to support Alpine Linux since a few months, and even more since Docker provides official PHP images based on Alpine.

Now this is it! As of today, Blackfire is fully available for Alpine Linux.

For the technical bits, this platform took a bit more time because Alpine Linux is not using the de-facto standard Glibc implementation of the libc but is shipped with Musl libc. We just completed the Blackfire Probe support for Alpine, whereas the agent and client (check out the full Blackfire stack) were already available for several months. As they are written in Go, we took another approach compiling fully static binaries without any requirements on Glibc nor Musl. This allows to use them even on naked environments (like with scratch Docker images).

To get started, just head to our installation documentation and:

  1. follow the Probe manual instructions selecting Alpine Linux
  2. follow the Agent and CLI manual instructions once again but pick Linux Static Binary.

We are at SymfonyLive, so if you have any questions about it, don’t be shy and come ask us.

Happy Alpine profiling!

Tugdual Saunier

Tugdual is a Product Developer at Blackfire.io. He started PHP programming when he was a teenager, and hasn’t stopped since. He discovered Symfony right after his studies and soon joined SensioLabs. A couple of years ago, with Fabien Potencier, he was exploring some options to optimize Symfony and Twig. And they got so frustrated by how hard it was to evaluate performance impact of some changes in code that they decided to explore the options available to improve the situation.