How to install Node JS in Docker with a Windows Container dotnet/aspnet:6.0?

Question

Seems like something that should be fairly simple, but since windows containers are using nano and don't have msiexec.exe to install packages with I'm not finding a well established alternative after googling for several hours now. So, how would one best do the below in a nano based windows container?

RUN msiexec.exe /i https://nodejs.org/dist/v18.7.0/node-v18.7.0-x64.msi /quiet

---

What I'm using:

• Windows Docker Containers
• dockerfile VS makes, which has a base of dotnet/aspnet:6.0 and uses dotnet/sdk:6.0 in the build stage

Base stage of dockerfile where I want to do my install of node at:

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:6.0 AS base
WORKDIR /app
EXPOSE 80
EXPOSE 443
# install node for npm usage
RUN msiexec.exe /i https://nodejs.org/dist/v18.7.0/node-v18.7.0-x64.msi /quiet

For what it's worth, I'm use to Linux based containers and this is the first time I've tried out using Windows ones. Please correct me on anything I may have misspoken on or misrepresented.

Answer 1

Welcome to the Windows world: :)

On Windows, .Net has two flavors: .Net and.Net Framework. The former (.Net) was previously called.Net Core and since its renaming to.Net it has caused some confusion. To clarify:

• .Net Framework is the legacy framework on which.Net was only available in Windows.
• .Net (formerly called.Net Core) is available on Windows and Linux. At first, .Net on Windows was only available on Nano Server base container images. However, recently the team made it available on the Server Core image, which supports a wider range of pre-requisites, such as MSIEXEC.

My suggestion to you is to look at the list of available tags for the image you want to use here: https://mcr.microsoft.com/en-us/product/dotnet/aspnet/tags

Also, look at the documentation of Windows containers. There's a particularity of Windows containers which is a version match requirement between container host and container. More details here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/deploy-containers/version-compatibility?tabs=windows-server-2022%2Cwindows-11-21H2