I know Alpine is also an option but in my opinion it’s not worth it. Yes, you’ll end up with a bit smaller image in the end but it comes at the cost of using musl instead of glibc. That’s too much of a side topic for this post but I’ve been burned in the past a few times when trying to switch to Alpine – such as having network instability and run-time performance when connecting to Postgres. I’m very happy sticking with Debian.

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You probably shouldn't use Alpine for Python projects, instead use the slim Docker image versions.

We recommend the Alpine image as it is tightly controlled and small in size (currently under 5 MB), while still being a full Linux distribution. This is fine advice for Go, but bad advice for Python, leading to slower builds, larger images, and obscure bugs.

The main caveat to note is that it does use musl libc instead of glibc and friends, so certain software might run into issues depending on the depth of their libc requirements. However, most software doesn't have an issue with this, so this variant is usually a very safe choice.

See this Hacker News comment thread for more discussion of the issues that might arise and some pro/con comparisons of using Alpine-based images.