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The smallest I've been able to get things without completely breaking everything was around 230mb. This required lots of ugly hacks such as post install triggers that would remove useless garbage such as /usr/share/doc/ and man pages.

  # debootstrap stable mydir
  # chroot mydir apt-get remove -y vim-common nano netcat-traditional e2fsprogs
  # chroot mydir apt-get clean
  # du -sh mydir
  228M mydir

With a little more work:

    cat /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/small
    path-exclude=/usr/share/locale/*
    path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*
    path-exclude=/usr/share/doc/*
    path-exclude=/usr/share/info/*

Saves about 15MB. Removing wget saves 50MB or so, since it uses a large library (libicu52).

    for p in $(dpkg --get-selections | cut -d $'\t' -f 1); do echo $(du -kc /x $(for i in `dpkg-query -L $p`; do [[ -f $i ]] && echo $i; done) | tail -n 1 | cut -d $'\t' -f 1) $p; done | sort -n | tail
    2676 libssl1.0.0:amd64
    3084 tzdata
    3152 libc-bin
    3288 groff-base
    3652 iptables
    5224 coreutils
    5660 perl-base
    6036 udev
    10308 libc6:amd64
    13784 systemd

(Since I've removed things, `dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n'` isn't accurate.)

Compressing Apt indices saves another 20MB [1]

The system is now down to 123MB.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReducingDiskFootprint#Compress_files

Did you also try stripping out the locale's from glibc that you don't need? In CentOS that frees up about 150MB for me.

debootstrap already only comes with the minimum (en_US, I think).

Excellent. I was not aware of that, thank you!

Note the coreutils-single package in Fedora rawhide which can be used to get coreutils down to about 1MB. Details on that change at http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/coreutils.git/commit...

You can also use separate build and deploy containers... build in a container with all the tooling you need, that exports out to a mount point everything needed to run, then turn that mount point into the new deploy container.

I posted this today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11046797

this is by one of the posters above you. its called Dockersl.im

> Here are a few numbers to give you an idea (using on Ubuntu 14 base image): > node: 431MB -> 14MB python: 433MB -> 15MB ruby: 406 MB -> 14MB java: 743MB -> 100MB

I don't need the full Debian ecosystem. All I need is some basic tools such as NPM, Pip or gem. They can take care of the rest.

What happens when your npm/pip/gem package depends on a C library like libpq or libsasl2? Restricting yourself to pure JS/Python/Ruby code to avoid having a few MBs sitting on the disk sounds like a terrible tradeoff.

And your reason is ... to share less between instances? The more code in common, the better, isn't?

When I trying to optimize my system of containers, I move everything common into topmost container, to make application containers smaller. You are doing opposite. Why?