Error installing on alpine

[anthony-hayes]

Describe the bug
I'm getting a sha256sum error when installing on Alpine Linux 3.18

Pants version
The pants installer script:curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL https://static.pantsbuild.org/setup/get-pants.sh | bash

OS
Alpine Linux 3.18

Additional info
Run apk add curl bash first
Perhaps this bug is related: gliderlabs/docker-alpine#174

[lilatomic]

Seems that the sha256sum bins are different. We expect it to have a --status option, but the one from alpine (upstream is busybox) uses -s for that.

[lilatomic]

Although even if we patch this issue, I'm not sure that it's going to work. IIRC, alpine uses a different compiler chain, and I don't think we build wheels for it. If your goal is to get code into an alpine docker container, pants' docker support can pull in PEXes which Pants builds outside of the container. Pants environments might also allow you to run commands or steps inside of an alpine container, although I don't have experience with them. If you really need to run Pants in an alpine container, I think you might need to build Pants from sources

[benjyw]

Yeah, our wheels are glibc, not musl, so to run on Alpine you'd have to build your own. It's possible we should distribute Pants for Alpine, but there haven't been a ton of requests for that so far.

What is the use case here?

[anthony-hayes]

Thanks for the quick responses!

The use case is using pants in CI, and on Alpine in general, mainly for project introspection, but I'm considering also using it for running tests in CI as well.

So I do want to run Pants in the alpine container if possible. Sounds like building from source is the only way to do that today.

I'd love if there was a distributed pants for Alpine, or some approved workaround (like https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/v3.15/main/ppc64le/libc6-compat).

It might be worth updating the documentation with a note that Alpine Linux is not yet supported. Such a note existed in earlier versions of pants: https://www.pantsbuild.org/2.0/docs/introduction/getting-started/installing-pants documentation. (Same for the linux on ARM note, I'm on x86 but am very interested in ARM support)

Thanks for the info though!

[ericsmalling]

FYI: Users running on Chainguard/Wofli based images have the same problem as they use gcc compiled busybox. A workaround is available by installing the wolfi coreutils package but it would be great if that wasn't needed.

[cburroughs]

FYI: Users running on Chainguard/Wofli based images have the same problem as they use gcc compiled busybox. A workaround is available by installing the wolfi coreutils package but it would be great if that wasn't needed.

get-pants.sh doesn't work because there is no bash by default, but unlike vanilla alpine Pants itself works (gcc instead of musl). Correct?

[ericsmalling]

It's the get-pants.sh script specifically needing sha256sum --status which, by default, is provided by busybox in both Alpine and Wolfi:

/ # ./get-pants.sh 
Downloading and installing the pants launcher ...
sha256sum: unrecognized option: status
BusyBox v1.37.0 (2025-12-16 14:19:28 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: sha256sum [-c[sw]] [FILE]...

Print or check SHA256 checksums

        -c      Check sums against list in FILEs
        -s      Don't output anything, status code shows success
        -w      Warn about improperly formatted checksum lines

But, yes, I think pants itsef should work on Wolfi given it's glibc base.

[ericsmalling]

Made a simple PR for this in case helpful (doesn't solve any Alpine / MUSL based incompatibilities though)