Creating an Alpine package for a Go application — APKBUILD

This article is a practical walkthrough for creating an Alpine package for a small Go application using APKBUILD.

Before starting, I recommend skimming:

• Alpine package creation docs
• Alpine packaging setup by Orhun
• Alpine Linux overview

Step 1: Create a small Go app

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Println("Hello from Alpine package!")
}

Push it to GitHub and include basic project files like a LICENSE. My example project was hello-alpine.

Step 2: prepare Alpine packaging tools

I used Docker because I was working from macOS, but you can do the same on an Alpine environment directly.

docker volume create alpine_data
docker run -it --name alpine_container -v alpine_data:/data alpine:latest /bin/sh
apk update
apk add alpine-sdk abuild sudo doas
adduser -D builder
addgroup builder abuild

Step 3: create the APKBUILD

Alpine provides newapkbuild to generate a starting point. From there you can update metadata, architecture, sources, and install steps.

newapkbuild -r \
  -u "https://github.com/manzil-infinity180/hello-alpine" \
  -d "A simple hello alpine go application" \
  -l "Apache-2.0 license" \
  "hello-alpine"

After editing APKBUILD, run the standard packaging flow:

abuild checksum
abuild -r
apkbuild-lint APKBUILD

Step 4: inspect and install the package

Once the package is built, Alpine places the resulting .apk under the packages directory. You can inspect it with tar and test installation with apk add --allow-untrusted.

tar tvvf hello-alpine-1.0.2-r0.apk
doas apk add --allow-untrusted ~/packages/builder/aarch64/hello-alpine-1.0.2-r0.apk
hello-alpine

Step 5: submit to Alpine

Since new packages generally go to testing, the usual flow is to add testing/<pkgname>/APKBUILD, commit it, and open a merge request on Alpine’s GitLab.

One review comment I hit was that the package should build from source rather than depending on a binary release. So I updated the APKBUILD to use a source tarball and go build directly.

makedepends="go"
source="$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz::https://github.com/manzil-infinity180/hello-alpine/archive/refs/tags/v$pkgver.tar.gz"

build() {
  go build -o hello-alpine .
}

package() {
  install -Dm755 "$srcdir/hello-alpine" "$pkgdir/usr/bin/hello-alpine"
}

That source-based approach is the better final version.