Tag: Docker-Compose

Talk Summary – OggCamp ’24 – Kubernetes, A Guide for Docker users

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

Format: Theatre Style room. ~30 attendees.

Slides: Available to view (Firefox/Chrome recommended – press “S” to see the required speaker notes)

Video: Not recorded. I’ll try to record it later, if I get a chance.

Slot: Graphine 1, 13:30-14:00

Notes: Apologies for the delay on posting this summary. The talk was delivered to a very busy room. Lots of amazing questions. The presenter notes were extensive, but entirely unused when delivered. One person asked a question, I said I’d follow up with them later, but didn’t find them before the end of the conference. One person asked about the benefits of EKS over ECS in AWS… as I’ve not used ECS, I couldn’t answer, but it sounds like they largely do the same thing.

"So many coats..." by "Scott Griggs" on Flickr

Migrating from docker-compose to Kubernetes Files

JonTheNiceGuy Leave a comment

Just so you know. This is a long article to explain my wandering path through understanding Kubernetes (K8S). It’s not an article to explain to you how to use K8S with your project. I hit a lot of blockers, due to the stack I’m using and I document them all. This means there’s a lot of noise and not a whole lot of Signal.

In a previous blog post I created a docker-compose.yml file for a PHP based web application. Now that I have a working Kubernetes environment, I wanted to port the configuration files into Kubernetes.

Initially, I was pointed at Kompose, a tool for converting docker-compose files to Kubernetes YAML formatted files, and, in fact, this gives me 99% of what I need… except, the current version uses beta API version flags for some of it’s outputted files, and this isn’t valid for the version of Kubernetes I’m running. So, let’s wind things back a bit, and find out what you need to do to use kompose first and then we can tweak the output file next.

Note: I’m running all these commands as root. There’s a bit of weirdness going on because I’m using the snap of Docker and I had a few issues with running these commands as a user… While I could have tried to get to the bottom of this with sudo and watching logs, I just wanted to push on… Anyway.

Here’s our “simple” docker-compose file.

version: '3'
services:
  db:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: mariadb/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/db
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: a_root_pw
      MYSQL_USER: a_user
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: a_password
      MYSQL_DATABASE: a_db
    expose:
      - 3306
  nginx:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: nginx/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/nginx
    ports:
      - 1980:80
  phpfpm:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: phpfpm/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/phpfpm

This has three components – the MariaDB database, the nginx web server and the PHP-FPM CGI service that nginx consumes. The database service exposes a port (3306) to other containers, with a set of hard-coded credentials (yep, that’s not great… working on that one!), while the nginx service opens port 1980 to port 80 in the container. So far, so … well, kinda sensible :)

If we run kompose convert against this docker-compose file, we get five files created; db-deployment.yaml, nginx-deployment.yaml, phpfpm-deployment.yaml, db-service.yaml and nginx-service.yaml. If we were to run kompose up on these, we get an error message…

Well, actually, first, we get a whole load of “INFO” and “WARN” lines up while kompose builds and pushes the containers into the MicroK8S local registry (a registry is a like a package repository, for containers), which is served by localhost:32000 (hence all the image: localhost:3200/someimage lines in the docker-compose.yml file), but at the end, we get (today) this error:

INFO We are going to create Kubernetes Deployments, Services and PersistentVolumeClaims for your Dockerized application. If you need different kind of resources, use the 'kompose convert' and 'kubectl create -f' commands instead.

FATA Error while deploying application: Get http://localhost:8080/api: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused

Uh oh! Well, this is a known issue at least! Kubernetes used to use, by default, http on port 8080 for it’s service, but now it uses https on port 6443. Well, that’s what I thought! In this issue on the MicroK8S repo, it says that it uses a different port, and you should use microk8s.kubectl cluster-info to find the port… and yep… Kubernetes master is running at https://127.0.0.1:16443. Bah.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# microk8s.kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes master is running at https://127.0.0.1:16443
Heapster is running at https://127.0.0.1:16443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/heapster/proxy
CoreDNS is running at https://127.0.0.1:16443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
Grafana is running at https://127.0.0.1:16443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/monitoring-grafana/proxy
InfluxDB is running at https://127.0.0.1:16443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/monitoring-influxdb:http/proxy

So, we export the KUBERNETES_MASTER environment variable, which was explained in that known issue I mentioned before, and now we get a credential prompt:

Please enter Username:

Oh no, again! I don’t have credentials!! Fortunately the MicroK8S issue also tells us how to find those! You run microk8s.config and it tells you the username!

roo@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# microk8s.config
apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: <base64-data>
    server: https://10.0.2.15:16443
  name: microk8s-cluster
contexts:
- context:
    cluster: microk8s-cluster
    user: admin
  name: microk8s
current-context: microk8s
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: admin
  user:
    username: admin
    password: QXdUVmN3c3AvWlJ3bnRmZVJmdFhpNkJ3cDdkR3dGaVdxREhuWWo0MmUvTT0K

So, our username is “admin” and our password is … well, in this case a string starting QX and ending 0K but yours will be different!

We run kompose up again, and put in the credentials… ARGH!

FATA Error while deploying application: Get https://127.0.0.1:16443/api: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

Well, now, that’s no good! Fortunately, a quick Google later, and up pops this Stack Overflow suggestion (mildly amended for my circumstances):

openssl s_client -showcerts -connect 127.0.0.1:16443 < /dev/null | sed -ne '/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p' | sudo tee /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/k8s.crt
update-ca-certificates
systemctl restart snap.docker.dockerd

Right then. Let’s run that kompose up statement again…

INFO We are going to create Kubernetes Deployments, Services and PersistentVolumeClaims for your Dockerized application. If you need different kind of resources, use the 'kompose convert' and 'kubectl create -f' commands instead.

Please enter Username: 
Please enter Password: 
INFO Deploying application in "default" namespace
INFO Successfully created Service: nginx
FATA Error while deploying application: the server could not find the requested resource

Bah! What resource do I need? Well, actually, there’s a bug in 1.20.0 of Kompose, and it should be fixed in 1.21.0. The “resource” it’s talking about is, I think, that one of the APIs refuses to process the converted YAML files. As a result, the “resource” is the service that won’t start. So, instead, let’s convert the file into the output YAML files, and then take a peak at what’s going wrong.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kompose convert
INFO Kubernetes file "nginx-service.yaml" created
INFO Kubernetes file "db-deployment.yaml" created
INFO Kubernetes file "nginx-deployment.yaml" created
INFO Kubernetes file "phpfpm-deployment.yaml" created

So far, so good! Now let’s run kubectl apply with each of these files.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl apply -f nginx-service.yaml
Warning: kubectl apply should be used on resource created by either kubectl create --save-config or kubectl apply
service/nginx configured
root@microk8s-a:~# kubectl apply -f nginx-deployment.yaml
error: unable to recognize "nginx-deployment.yaml": no matches for kind "Deployment" in version "extensions/v1beta1"

Apparently the service files are all OK, the problem is in the deployment files. Hmm OK, let’s have a look at what could be wrong. Here’s the output file:

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# cat nginx-deployment.yaml
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  annotations:
    kompose.cmd: kompose convert
    kompose.version: 1.20.0 (f3d54d784)
  creationTimestamp: null
  labels:
    io.kompose.service: nginx
  name: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 1
  strategy: {}
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        kompose.cmd: kompose convert
        kompose.version: 1.20.0 (f3d54d784)
      creationTimestamp: null
      labels:
        io.kompose.service: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: localhost:32000/nginx
        name: nginx
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
        resources: {}
      restartPolicy: Always
status: {}

Well, the extensions/v1beta1 API version doesn’t seem to support “Deployment” options any more, so let’s edit it to change that to what the official documentation example shows today. We need to switch to using the apiVersion: apps/v1 value. Let’s see what happens when we make that change!

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl apply -f nginx-deployment.yaml
error: error validating "nginx-deployment.yaml": error validating data: ValidationError(Deployment.spec): missing required field "selector" in io.k8s.api.apps.v1.DeploymentSpec; if you choose to ignore these errors, turn validation off with --validate=false

Hmm this seems to be a fairly critical issue. A selector basically tells the orchestration engine which images we want to be deployed. Let’s go back to the official example. So, we need to add the “selector” value in the “spec” block, at the same level as “template”, and it needs to match the labels we’ve specified. It also looks like we don’t need most of the metadata that kompose has given us. So, let’s adjust the deployment to look a bit more like that example.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# cat nginx-deployment.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: nginx
  name: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: localhost:32000/nginx
        name: nginx
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
        resources: {}
      restartPolicy: Always

Fab. And what happens when we run it?

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl apply -f nginx-deployment.yaml
deployment.apps/nginx created

Woohoo! Let’s apply all of these now.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# for i in db-deployment.yaml nginx-deployment.yaml nginx-service.yaml phpfpm-deployment.yaml; do kubectl apply -f $i ; done
deployment.apps/db created
deployment.apps/nginx unchanged
service/nginx unchanged
deployment.apps/phpfpm created

Oh, hang on a second, that service (service/nginx) is unchanged, but we changed the label from io.kompose.service: nginx to app: nginx, so we need to fix that. Let’s open it up and edit it!

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  annotations:
    kompose.cmd: kompose convert
    kompose.version: 1.20.0 (f3d54d784)
  creationTimestamp: null
  labels:
    io.kompose.service: nginx
  name: nginx
spec:
  ports:
  - name: "1980"
    port: 1980
    targetPort: 80
  selector:
    io.kompose.service: nginx
status:
  loadBalancer: {}

Ah, so this has the “annotations” field too, in the metadata, and, as suspected, it’s got the io.kompose.service label as the selector. Hmm OK, let’s fix that.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# cat nginx-service.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app: nginx
  name: nginx
spec:
  ports:
  - name: "1980"
    port: 1980
    targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app: nginx
status:
  loadBalancer: {}

Much better. And let’s apply it…

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl apply -f nginx-service.yaml
service/nginx configured

Fab! So, let’s review the state of the deployments, the services, the pods and the replication sets.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl get deploy
NAME     READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
db       1/1     1            1           8m54s
nginx    0/1     1            0           8m53s
phpfpm   1/1     1            1           8m48s

Hmm. That doesn’t look right. 

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl get pod
NAME                      READY   STATUS             RESTARTS   AGE
db-f78f9f69b-grqfz        1/1     Running            0          9m9s
nginx-7774fcb84c-cxk4v    0/1     CrashLoopBackOff   6          9m8s
phpfpm-66945b7767-vb8km   1/1     Running            0          9m3s
root@microk8s-a:~# kubectl get rs
NAME                DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
db-f78f9f69b        1         1         1       9m18s
nginx-7774fcb84c    1         1         0       9m17s
phpfpm-66945b7767   1         1         1       9m12s

Yep. What does “CrashLoopBackOff” even mean?! Let’s check the logs. We need to ask the pod itself, not the deployment, so let’s use the kubectl logs command to ask.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl logs nginx-7774fcb84c-cxk4v
2020/01/17 08:08:50 [emerg] 1#1: host not found in upstream "phpfpm" in /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:10
nginx: [emerg] host not found in upstream "phpfpm" in /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:10

Hmm. That’s not good. We were using the fact that Docker just named everything for us in the docker-compose file, but now in Kubernetes, we need to do something different. At this point I ran out of ideas. I asked on the McrTech slack for advice. I was asked to run this command, and would you look at that, there’s nothing for nginx to connect to.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl get service
NAME         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.152.183.1    <none>        443/TCP    24h
nginx        ClusterIP   10.152.183.62   <none>        1980/TCP   9m1s

It turns out that I need to create a service for each of the deployments. So, now I have a separate service for each one. I copied the nginx-service.yaml file into db-service.yaml and phpfpm-service.yaml, edited the files and now… tada!

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl get service
NAME         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
db           ClusterIP   10.152.183.61   <none>        3306/TCP   5m37s
kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.152.183.1    <none>        443/TCP    30h
nginx        ClusterIP   10.152.183.62   <none>        1980/TCP   5h54m
phpfpm       ClusterIP   10.152.183.69   <none>        9000/TCP   5m41s

But wait… How do I actually address nginx now? Huh. No external-ip (not even “pending”, which is what I ended up with), no ports to talk to. Uh oh. Now I need to understand how to hook this service up to the public IP of this node. Ahh, see up there it says “ClusterIP”? That means “this service is only available INSIDE the cluster”. If I change this to “NodePort” or “LoadBalancer”, it’ll attach that port to the external interface.

What’s the difference between “NodePort” and “LoadBalancer”? Well, according to this page, if you are using a managed Public Cloud service that supports an external load balancer, then putting this to “LoadBalancer” should attach your “NodePort” to the provider’s Load Balancer automatically. Otherwise, you need to define the “NodePort” value in your config (which must be a value between 30000 and 32767, although that is configurable for the node). Once you’ve done that, you can hook your load balancer up to that port, for example Client -> Load Balancer IP (TCP/80) -> K8S Cluster IP (e.g. TCP/31234)

So, how does this actually look. I’m going to use the “LoadBalancer” option, because if I ever deploy this to “live”, I want it to integrate with the load balancer, but for now, I can cope with addressing a “high port”. Right, well, let me open back up that nginx-service.yaml, and make the changes.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# cat nginx-service.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app: nginx
  name: nginx
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - name: nginx
    nodePort: 30000
    port: 1980
    targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app: nginx
status:
  loadBalancer: {}

The key parts here are the lines type: LoadBalancer and nodePort: 30000 under spec: and ports: respectively. Note that I can use, at this point type: LoadBalancer and type: NodePort interchangably, but, as I said, if you were using this in something like AWS or Azure, you might want to do it differently!

So, now I can curl http://192.0.2.100:30000 (where 192.0.2.100 is the address of my “bridged interface” of K8S environment) and get a response from my PHP application, behind nginx, and I know (from poking at it a bit) that it works with my Database.

OK, one last thing. I don’t really want lots of little files which have got config items in. I quite liked the docker-compose file as it was, because it had all the services in as one block, and I could run “docker-compose up”, but the kompose script split it out into lots of pieces. In Kubernetes, if the YAML file it loads has got a divider in it (a line like this: ---) then it stops parsing it at that point, and starts reading the file after that as a new file. Like this I could have the following layout:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
more: stuff
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
more: stuff
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
more: stuff
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
more: stuff

But, thinking about it, I quite like having each piece logically together, so I really want db.yaml, nginx.yaml and phpfpm.yaml, where each of those files contains both the deployment and the service. So, let’s do that. I’ll do one file, so it makes more sense, and then show you the output.

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# mkdir -p k8s
root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# mv db-deployment.yaml k8s/db.yaml
root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# echo "---" >> k8s/db.yaml
root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# cat db-service.yaml >> k8s/db.yaml
root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# rm db-service.yaml
root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# cat k8s/db.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: db
  name: db
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: db
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: db
    spec:
      containers:
      - env:
        - name: MYSQL_DATABASE
          value: a_db
        - name: MYSQL_PASSWORD
          value: a_password
        - name: MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD
          value: a_root_pw
        - name: MYSQL_USER
          value: a_user
        image: localhost:32000/db
        name: db
        resources: {}
      restartPolicy: Always
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app: db
  name: db
spec:
  ports:
  - name: mariadb
    port: 3306
    targetPort: 3306
  selector:
    app: db
status:
  loadBalancer: {}

So, now, if I do kubectl apply -f k8s/db.yaml I’ll get this output:

root@microk8s-a:~/glowing-adventure# kubectl apply -f k8s/db.yaml
deployment.apps/db unchanged
service/db unchanged

You can see the final files in the git repo for this set of tests.

Next episode, I’ll start looking at making my application scale (as that’s the thing that Kubernetes is known for) and having more than one K8S node to house my K8S pods!

Featured image is “So many coats…” by “Scott Griggs” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-ND license.

"Shipping Containers" by "asgw" on Flickr

Creating my first Docker containerized LEMP (Linux, nginx, MariaDB, PHP) application

JonTheNiceGuy 4 Comments

Want to see what I built without reading the why’s and wherefore’s? The git repository with all the docker-compose goodness is here!

Late edit 2020-01-16: The fantastic Jerry Steel, my co-host on The Admin Admin podcast looked at what I wrote, and made a few suggestions. I’ve updated the code in the git repo, and I’ll try to annotate below when I’ve changed something. If I miss it, it’s right in the Git repo!

One of the challenges I set myself this Christmas was to learn enough about Docker to put an arbitrary PHP application, that I would previously have misused Vagrant to contain.

Just before I started down this rabbit hole, I spoke to my Aunt about some family tree research my father had left behind after he died, and how I wished I could easily share the old tree with her (I organised getting her a Chromebook a couple of years ago, after fighting with doing remote support for years on Linux and Windows laptops). In the end, I found a web application for genealogical research called HuMo-gen, that is a perfect match for both projects I wanted to look at.

HuMo-gen was first created in 1999, with a PHP version being released in 2005. It used MySQL or MariaDB as the Database engine. I was reasonably confident that I could have created a Vagrantfile to deliver this on my home server, but I wanted to try something new. I wanted to use the “standard” building blocks of Docker and Docker-Compose, and some common containers to make my way around learning Docker.

I started by looking for some resources on how to build a Docker container. Much of the guidance I’d found was to use Docker-Compose, as this allows you to stand several components up at the same time!

In contrast to how Vagrant works (which is basically a CLI wrapper to many virtual machine services), Docker isolates resources for a single process that runs on a machine. Where in Vagrant, you might run several processes on one machine (perhaps, in this instance, nginx, PHP-FPM and MariaDB), with Docker, you’re encouraged to run each “service” as their own containers, and link them together with an overlay network. It’s possible to also do the same with Vagrant, but you’ll end up with an awful lot of VM overhead to separate out each piece.

So, I first needed to select my services. My initial line-up was:

  • MariaDB
  • PHP-FPM
  • Apache’s httpd2 (replaced by nginx)

I was able to find official Docker images for PHP, MariaDB and httpd, but after extensive tweaking, I couldn’t make the httpd image talk the way I wanted it to with the PHP image. Bowing to what now seems to be conventional wisdom, I swapped out the httpd service for nginx.

One of the stumbling blocks for me, particularly early on, was how to build several different Dockerfiles (these are basically the instructions for the container you’re constructing). Here is the basic outline of how to do this:

version: '3'
services:
  yourservice:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: relative/path/to/Dockerfile

In this docker-compose.yml file, I tell it that to create the yourservice service, it needs to build the docker container, using the file in ./relative/path/to/Dockerfile. This file in turn contains an instruction to import an image.

Each service stacks on top of each other in that docker-compose.yml file, like this:

version: '3'
services:
  service1:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: service1/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/service1
  service2:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: service2/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/service2

Late edit 2020-01-16: This previously listed Dockerfile/service1, however, much of the documentation suggested that Docker gets quite opinionated about the file being called Dockerfile. While docker-compose can work around this, it’s better to stick to tradition :) The docker-compose.yml files below have also been adjusted accordingly. I’ve also added an image: somehost:1234/image_name line to help with tagging the images for later use. It’s not critical to what’s going on here, but I found it useful with some later projects.

To allow containers to see ports between themselves, you add the expose: command in your docker-compose.yml, and to allow that port to be visible from the “outside” (i.e. to the host and upwards), use the ports: command listing the “host” port (the one on the host OS), then a colon and then the “target” port (the one in the container), like these:

version: '3'
services:
  service1:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: service1/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/service1
    expose:
    - 12345
  service2:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: service2/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/service2
    ports:
    - 8000:80

Now, let’s take a quick look into the Dockerfiles. Each “statement” in a Dockerfile adds a new “layer” to the image. For local operations, this probably isn’t a problem, but when you’re storing these images on a hosted provider, you want to keep these images as small as possible.

I built a Database Dockerfile, which is about as small as you can make it!

FROM mariadb:10.4.10

Yep, one line. How cool is that? In the docker-compose.yml file, I invoke this, like this:

version: '3'
services:
  db:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: mariadb/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/db
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: a_root_pw
      MYSQL_USER: a_user
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: a_password
      MYSQL_DATABASE: a_db
    expose:
      - 3306

OK, so this one is a bit more complex! I wanted it to build my Dockerfile, which is “mariadb/Dockerfile“. I wanted it to restart the container whenever it failed (which hopefully isn’t that often!), and I wanted to inject some specific environment variables into the file – the root and user passwords, a user account and a database name. Initially I was having some issues where it wasn’t building the database with these credentials, but I think that’s because I wasn’t “building” the new database, I was just using it. I also expose the MariaDB (MySQL) port, 3306 to the other containers in the docker-compose.yml file.

Let’s take a look at the next part! PHP-FPM. Here’s the Dockerfile:

FROM php:7.4-fpm
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo pdo_mysql
ADD --chown=www-data:www-data public /var/www/html

There’s a bit more to this, but not loads. We build our image from a named version of PHP, and install two extensions to PHP, pdo and pdo_mysql. Lastly, we copy the content of the “public” directory into the /var/www/html path, and make sure it “belongs” to the right user (www-data).

I’d previously tried to do a lot more complicated things with this Dockerfile, but it wasn’t working, so instead I slimmed it right down to just this, and the docker-compose.yml is a lot simpler too.

  phpfpm:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: phpfpm/Dockerfile
    image: localhost:32000/phpfpm

See! Loads simpler! Now we need the complicated bit! :) This is the Dockerfile for nginx.

FROM nginx:1.17.7
COPY nginx/default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

COPY public /var/www/html

Weirdly, even though I’ve added version numbers for MariaDB and PHP, I’ve not done the same for nginx, perhaps I should! Late edit 2020-01-16: I’ve put a version number on there now, previously where it said nginx:1.17.7 it actually said nginx:latest.

I’ve created the configuration block for nginx in a single “RUN” line. Late edit 2020-01-16: This Dockerfile now doesn’t have a giant echo 'stuff' > file block either, following Jerry’s advice, and I’m using COPY instead of ADD on his advice too. I’ll show that config file below. There’s a couple of high points for me here!

server {
  index index.php index.html;
  server_name _;
  error_log /proc/self/fd/2;
  access_log /proc/self/fd/1;
  root /var/www/html;
  location ~ \.php$ {
    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_pass phpfpm:9000;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
  }
}
  • server_name _; means “use this block for all unnamed requests”.
  • access_log /proc/self/fd/1; and error_log /proc/self/fd/2;These are links to the “stdout” and “stderr” file descriptors (or pointers to other parts of the filesystem), and basically means that when you do docker-compose logs, you’ll see the HTTP logs for the server! These two files are guaranteed to be there, while /dev/stderr isn’t!

Because nginx is “just” caching the web content, and I know the content doesn’t need to be written to from nginx, I knew I didn’t need to do the chown action, like I did with the PHP-FPM block.

Lastly, I need to configure the docker-compose.yml file for nginx:

  nginx:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile/nginx
    image: localhost:32000/nginx
    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:1980:80

I’ve gone for a slightly unusual ports configuration when I deployed this to my web server… you see, I already have the HTTP port (TCP/80) configured for use on my home server – for running the rest of my web services. During development, on my home machine, the ports line instead showed “1980:80” because I was running this on Instead, I’m running this application bound to “localhost” (127.0.0.1) on a different port number (1980 selected because it could, conceivably, be a birthday of someone on this system), and then in my local web server configuration, I’m proxying connections to this service, with HTTPS encryption as well. That’s all outside the scope of this article (as I probably should be using something like Traefik, anyway) but it shows you how you could bind to a separate port too.

Anyway, that was my Docker journey over Christmas, and I look forward to using it more, going forward!

Featured image is “Shipping Containers” by “asgw” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.