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Creating a Web Server

This section will cover setting up a web server using Docker.

Table of Contents​
  • Introduction
  • Creating the Website
  • Running the Docker Container
  • Conclusion

Introduction​

There are many ways to host a web server. Some methods include installing a web server like Nginx or Apache bare metal or using containers.

This section will be using the Nginx Docker container to host a simple website.

Creating the Website​

Before hosting it, we will need some files. For a HTML site, all we need is a index.html file. The following can be its contents.

<html>
	<body>
		<h1>My self-hosted website!</h1>
	</body>
</html>

Once we have the file, we will also need a VM and Docker installed on it, which has been covered in previous sections.

Running the Docker Container​

Once we have the prerequisites, we can use the Nginx Docker container to host our website.

https://hub.docker.com/_/nginx

To use it, we will need to specify a directory where our index.html file can be found at. This example will be using /web-content as the directory within the user home directory.

/home/<username>/web-content

self-host-creating-web-1

Once everything is in place, we can use the following command.

docker run --name web-svr -p 80:80 -v /home/<username>/web-content:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro -d nginx

Command breakdown:

  • run - Specify to run a container in Docker.
  • --name web-svr - Specify the container name.
  • -p 80:80 - Map port 80 from the host to port 80 within the container.
  • -v /home/<username>/web-content:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro - Specify the directory to read files from on the host and store it in the /usr/share/nginx/html directory in the container.
  • -d - Run the container detach mode.
  • nginx - Specify the Docker image to use.

self-host-creating-web-2

The command will allow us to navigate to our website that is running on port 80. Without mapping it with -p, the website will not be accessible from outside the host machine. We can change the host port to something else if we wish to use a different port.

An example:

-p 8080:80

The above flag will allow us to navigate to port 8080 to view the website.

self-host-creating-web-4

Once the container has been successfully created, we can view it by navigating to http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1:<port> if 80 isn't the port used.

Accessing web-svr container from port 80:

self-host-creating-web-3

Accessing web-svr2 container from port 8080:

self-host-creating-web-5

Conclusion​

There are many things that can be done with containers such as running whole services like hosting your own cloud server. This section only covers the basics of creating a container. In later sections, container management and orchestration will be covered.