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sibling comments about Nix are not acknowledging that the base image size is around 600MB vs 5MB for alpine

This is only true if use a Docker based workflow using `FROM nixos/nix`. This image exists mainly as a way for people to try out Nix with, not to build production images on top of. We ship many things which bloat the image size but makes it nicer for interactive usage.

Using dockerTools from nixpkgs is much better and gives you much smaller images closer to Alpine size.

I might have confused download volume with image size but the tar.gz for dockerTools.buildLayeredImage with just node and mariadb in the contents is still 220MB (just checked)

Edit: with nothing in the contents it's 144M, which is getting reasonable but still nearly 30x alpine base

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