node:latest for alpine, apk not found because sbin is not on path

Question

I am running a docker-compose file using node:latest. I noticed an issue with the timezone that I am trying to fix. Following an example I found online, I tried to install tzdata. This is not working as I keep getting apk not found errors. After finding this stackoverflow.com question, Docker Alpine /bin/sh apk not found, it seems to mirror my issue as I docker exec'ed into the container and found the apk command in the /sbin folder. I tried to do the following to make it work but I am still not able to access apk. From other articles I found, this seemed to be the way to resolve the issue but apk is still not found.

CMD export PATH=$PATH:$ADDITIONAL_PATH
RUN apk add --no-cache tzdata
ENV TZ=America/Chicago

Answer 1

node:latest is based on buildpack-deps, which is based on Debian. Debian does not use apk; it uses apt. You either want to use Debian's apt to install packages (apt-get install tzdata) or switch to node:alpine, which uses apk for package management.