Building for alpine/musl

Build, specifying a branch (or a tag)

make all BRANCH=v3.1.1

Building without a TAG builds the master branch

make all

Upon completion, the distribution package will be extracted from the container to the local dist directory.

At the time of writing this, builds take ~10-15min. Dependent on internet speed.

What's going on?

A simple build container is created based on Alpine Linux. The build container simply runs the build.sh script.

build.sh

Should be fairly easy to parse through the script, but here is a basic overview.

1. Sets up Go environment, installs required packages, clones the grafana codebase
2. Replaces default ldflags in build.go. -w becomes -w -linkmode external -extldflags '-static'. Some more info on that here
3. Builds backend and frontend
4. Removes musl incompatible phantomjs. NOTE: Causes some features to break. Working on compiling a full list.
5. Strips binaries, removing inessential information and reducing size (that is the goal here after all)
6. Cleans up packages which are no longer needed