Alpine Strikes Again

You know you are running Alpine containers when… ls tells you a file is present and executable:

$ ls -la ./artifacts/vault-plugin-splunk
-rwxr-xr-x    1 3434     3434      17774300 Jun 14 09:36 ./artifacts/vault-plugin-splunk

however, actually executing it results in an error:

$ ./artifacts/vault-plugin-splunk
/bin/bash: line 2: ./artifacts/vault-plugin-splunk: No such file or directory
Exited with code 127

A quick check with ldd will confirm that some library cannot be found.

Given how small Ubuntu “slim” container images are nowadays, and how many times per month I am being asked about this particular error, I am wondering why we are bothering with Alpine at all.