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I Reduced My production Docker Container’s Size by 96% 😎
From a whopping 1.1GB to just 40MB!
Lately, I’ve been working on a side project that I hope to turn into a start-up soon.
Since I wanted to make it easy to deploy, I delegated generating the types, building the binary, and running the server to a Dockerfile.
My initial Approach
Naively, I was using a go docker image as the base 😆, copying the whole project into a docker directory, 🙄 generating the types ( + downloading dependencies),😐 and building the binaries!
The result?
A docker build command took about 40 seconds and came in at a hefty 1.1GBs. That’s just crazy!
Upon further inspection, I realized how much I could optimize by making a few small changes to my Dockerfile.
So without further ado, here’s THE list you didn’t know you needed.
Start By Using The Alpine Image
If you are running a go server, you don’t need to have the go image installed.
Why? As you will see in the next section, golang can produce OS-specific binaries.
Generating a binary means turning your app into machine code (think 0s and 1s), resulting in a single executable file.
Binaries make the app much faster as the computer doesn’t need any language environment or dependencies installed.
Just run the binary file!
So you can switch to the Alpine image (Linux), which comes in at a whopping 5MB and includes most of what you will need for deploying your server.
Use Go’s Binary Generation
Creating a binary for your end system is all you need to run your app without wasting precious space or CPU cycles.
Here’s the go command to generate a binary for a specific OS.
This command creates an executable that you can run with ./
