Alpine Linux is a small and functional Linux distribution. Most shell commands are provided by BusyBox, as ls, rm, etc, but also crond, sendmail, inetd, etc.

Most documentation is on https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Main_Page.

At the moment, cloud image is available for AWS. The ssh login user name is alpine by default. After the first install on a t4g.nano instance with 2 vCPUs, 0.5 GB memory, 390 MB memory is free for use, in contrast to the installation of Amazon Linux 2023 on the same instance, which leaves 300 MB memory free for use.

Use doas for sudo, apk for yum or apt as software package manager.

doas apk update
doas apk upgrade
apk search
doas apk add

doas poweroff
doas reboot

The commands to be executed after a user’s login is saved in $HOME/.profile. For example, to customise the search PATH, add into $HOME/.profile

PATH=$PATH:<path>
export PATH

The background services (aka init system) are managed by OpenRC. For example, to start the crond daemon for the crontab service,

rc-service crond status
doas rc-service crond start

but at reboot the last line above won’t restart the crond service automatically. Do

doas rc-update add crond default

to schedule crond to be started at every reboot; or simply

rc-update

to check all scheduled services at various runlevels.