Lifecycle guide for Alpine Linux from Alpine Linux

All releases, patches, maintenance and support periods at a glance

All supported products Free Versio.io trial

📅 Last update on 2026-03-09

What is Alpine Linux?

Automate product release and end-of-life management

Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution based on musl and BusyBox, designed for security, simplicity, and resource efficiency. It uses OpenRC for its init system and compiles all user-space binaries as position-independent executables with stack-smashing protection.

The entire lifecycle of Alpine Linux

The following figure shows you the visualised product life cycle of Alpine Linux. You can see all releases with the latest patch version, the long-term support characteristics (orange flag in the green circle, the periods for version provision, maintenance and support.

Alpine Linux (Alpine Linux) release, version and end-of-life information

Figure: Release, patch and end-of-life cycle of product Alpine Linux (Alpine Linux)

What is the Alpine Linux release strategy?

There are several release branches for Alpine Linux available at the same time. Each May and November we make a release branch from edge. The main repository is typically supported for 2 years and the community repository is supported until next stable release.