alpine-make-vm-image

build your packages inside a docker container and that's why I never even bothered with the VM route, even in situations where I'm deploying VM images. There needs to be a VM based alternative to "docker build" that doesn't necessarily spit out a VM image, but rather it spits out the result of your build (e.g. packages) onto a mounted directory on the host. If you never built your own alpine packages. Try writing an APKBUILD. It is very easy. 2. Building VM images Now let's say we are done and just want to build our VM images. There are already distro specific tools like https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-make-vm-image. What you want to do is install the packages created in the first step, run a simple bash script for finishing touches and setup cloud-init for the first boot. Unlike a Dockerfile, this should be kept very simple, because the packages are already doing everything the Dockerfile is expected to do. The only thing I would overcomplicate here is directly integrating a package repository into the tool to make it effortless. 3. Running the VM At this point everything should be quite simple. The primary use case is to run the VM image locally on a developer computer before deployment. Some quality of life features like docker style port proxying and mounting directories would be nice. This is by far the easiest part because tools like virt-manager already exist.