TIL how to use lax pinning in Alpine Linux
2026-04-13 • 1 min

To pin the version to a major or minor release in apk (i.e. fuzzy matching):

# matches 3.X.Y-rZ
apk add 'openssl=~3'

# matches 3.5.Y-rZ
apk add 'openssl=~3.5'

# matches 3.5.1-rZ
apk add 'openssl=~3.5.1'

By default, apk add will avoid changing installed packages unless required. This means if the installed version of openssl is 3.5.1, and we run apk add openssl=~3.5 it will not be upgraded to 3.5.2 if its available.

To upgrade to the latest installable version (eg. 3.5.2), we must use apk add --upgrade openssl=~3.5.

# References

Last Updated: 2026-04-13