Upgrade the base Alpine OS

[Sangeppato]

How should we upgrade the base Alpine Linux image?
It looks like running the usual apk update/apk upgrade is not working in a persistent way (I guess tmpfs is used?), so should we delete the instance and create a new one from time to time to upgrade Alpine?
Or can we simply replace basedisk by downloading a new image from abiosoft/alpine-lima?

[abiosoft]

To be honest, the VM is not designed to be updated and only selected directories persist across reboots.

If you are not particular about Alpine, you can use the --layer flag to enable Ubuntu and use that instead. Whatever you do in the Ubuntu environment persist across reboots.

[Sangeppato]

Thanks!
In case you release a new Alpine image and I want to upgrade an older VM I have, can I just replace the basedisk? Or should I backup my Docker data volumes, delete the VM and create a new one?

[abiosoft]

That can actually work but I have not tested it.

[Sangeppato]

I've tried to downgrade basedisk and the machine still boots just fine, but was not actually downgraded (apparently many files are copied to diffdisk during initialization), so it looks like the only way to upgrade the base OS is to delete and re-create the VM (losing all the images and volumes).

@abiosoft
Since Lima now supports additional data disks, do you think it would be possible for Colima to use a disk mounted at /var/lib/docker, in order to persist Docker data across different VM initializations?

[abiosoft]

@Sangeppato that's a good point. It will definitely be considered.

Thanks.

[Sangeppato]

@Sangeppato that's a good point. It will definitely be considered.

Thanks.

That's great, thank you!

FYI, it looks like finch does something similar for containerd, maybe this could be useful