I just wanted to convert SVG to PNG files with Python and the library CairoSVG. That was no problem on my Ubuntu system. But running the SVG converter script within a lightweight Alpine Docker container turned out to be problematic. Figuring out which libraries have to be installed up front took me some time. That’s why I like to share my findings here. Hopefully, it’ll save your time.

Imagine you clone a git repo and try to start its application in your IDE. It fails. Why? The database is missing. After installing and starting a database manually you look at an empty application. There is no data in the database. Moreover, the application still doesn’t work as it requires an external service… The process of setting up a local development environment is often a journey of pain with many manual actions and implicit knowledge. How cool would it be, if we just have to call docker-compose up and the whole environment is automatically created locally containing nice dummy data?

Developing with Python was a refreshing and pleasant experience. After working with Java for a while, you may forget how verbose and clumsy this language is sometimes. But Python shows how simple and powerful a programming language can be. Let me show you some examples.