Simple nginx example

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a web server with a strong focus on high concurrency, performance and low memory usage. It can also act as a reverse proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer and an HTTP cache.

You can find the wikipedia page for a quick overview or the official website for news, documentation, download etc ...

Oh, and it's open-source ^^

We will go in this post through a quick static hosting using the nginx docker container.

Prerequisites :

you need to install docker

write the files

The nginx container is just 130mb, you can start pulling it with :

docker pull nginx:latest

Go/create the project directory and create a html index page :

echo "Hello from NginX" > index.html

Generate a nginx conf. We say that we want to serve on port 80 for the / location

cat <<EOF > site.conf
server {
  listen 80;
  location / {
    root /www;
  }
}
EOF

and the Dockerfile to run our website

cat <<EOF > Dockerfile
FROM        nginx:latest

RUN         rm /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf

WORKDIR     /usr/src

COPY        index.html   /www/
COPY        site.conf    /etc/nginx/conf.d/

ENTRYPOINT  nginx -g 'daemon off;'
EOF

Build the container

docker build -t my-website .

and run it

docker run -d -p 80:80 my-website > container_id

look if all is fine :

$ curl localhost
Hello from NginX

Then clean

$ cat container_id | xargs docker stop
9ddc387b297b

$ cat container_id | xargs docker rm
9ddc387b297b

$ docker rmi my-website
Untagged: my-website:latest
Deleted: 421067b514bf3f4b48cdb857b5115d1cb2170fd598a757f074e2ae069d0ea5bf
Deleted: 5570ce98d46297675aadbe5583a75b782e4dae45d332a20e0748df62dc86ad12
Deleted: 92f8b0503754cb577542d57d68c7be5988169ee73d5636e6cef36228c808f981
Deleted: 0acf6acd16f33ca34c8352606e668bf4cf0a340abf4502fab2a069075d27e389
Deleted: 190abb46cbc94826b6cdf587ea353bcc56851d8fca7392d2b254daa15b00d9dd

Written on July 12, 2015