How do I find out which Alpine Linux packages are currently available for add-ons?

Development
1

In the documentation on configuring add-ons it says

All add-ons are based on the latest Alpine Linux image.

However, when I search for packages on the Alpine Packages web page I see ones that don’t work with the apk command (e.g. php82) in my add-on configurations - the packages can’t be found - so I am guessing that the “latest” Alpine Linux release doesn’t mean edge and through trial and error I am not sure it means 3.17 either.

What is the best way for me to find out which exact packages are available for use in my addons? Am I looking in completely the wrong place, or do I need to filter for a specific repository and branch?

2

It looks like 3.17

3

Looks like php82 is in Alpine edge.

php82 is not in any of the available base images based on debian (bullseye) or ubuntu (20.04) either.

Source: distrowatch DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

4

Checking again, and although the images seem to now be based on Alpine 3.18, and PHP82 is available on 3.18 according to the Alpine package list.

I confirmed that my addon is using 3.18 by connecting to the container and running cat /etc/os-release which returned

NAME="Alpine Linux"
ID=alpine
VERSION_ID=3.18.2
PRETTY_NAME="Alpine Linux v3.18"

So this should be able to install PHP82, but this doesn’t work.

Now I don’t really need PHP82 over 81 right now - that is just a symptom of the overall problem I am having: determining which packages are available for addons. Knowing that Alpine 3.18 is used is not sufficient by itself - the apk command is failing to download packages that should be available to 3.18. Having to figure this out by trial and error is frustrating.

5

Ok - I think I have tracked down my confusion. The apk for php82 doesn’t create a symlink from php, which the apk for php81 does. So apk add --no-cache does indeed install php82, but the command php -S 0.0.0.0:8000 fails to start the server. php82 -S 0.0.0.0:8000 does start the server.

:man_facepalming:t2: