Run nginx in docker container

Docker can be used to run nginx in a container. We’ll use Ubuntu Linux (14.04.2) for the purpose of this tutorial. This tutorial assumes that you have installed docker on your Ubuntu machine.

Download latest nginx image

$ docker pull nginx
Using default tag: latest
latest: Pulling from library/nginx
...
Status: Downloaded newer image for nginx:latest

Run nginx server with name nginx1 and port 8081 mapped to contaner port 80.

$ docker run --name nginx1 -p 8081:80 -d  nginx
3cad33cde70b1a75ae37725fd35dea01cfe306d39991ba1d8ce730c4d92fa00a
docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                           NAMES
e301d1d599f0        nginx               "nginx -g 'daemon off"   2 seconds ago       Up 2 seconds        443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8081->80/tcp   nginx1

Check if nginx is listening on port 8081.

$ curl http://localhost:8081/
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>
<style>
    body {
        width: 35em;
        margin: 0 auto;
        font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
    }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to nginx!</h1>
<p>If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and
working. Further configuration is required.</p>

<p>For online documentation and support please refer to
<a href="http://nginx.org/">nginx.org</a>.<br/>
Commercial support is available at
<a href="http://nginx.com/">nginx.com</a>.</p>

<p><em>Thank you for using nginx.</em></p>
</body>
</html>

Link nginx document root to local directory.

$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/tmp/nginx1/html
$ sudo bash -c 'echo "foo" > /opt/tmp/nginx1/html/index.html'

## in case old container is running
$ docker kill nginx1
$ docker rm nginx1

##
$ docker run --name nginx1 -p 8081:80 -d -v /opt/tmp/nginx1/log:/var/log/nginx  -v /opt/tmp/nginx1/html:/usr/share/nginx/html nginx
$ curl http://localhost:8081/
foo
$ cat /opt/tmp/nginx1/log/access.log 
172.17.0.1 - - [05/Feb/2016:05:05:41 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 4 "-" "curl/7.35.0" "-"

Get an interactive bash shell in running nginx container
```
$ docker exec -it nginx1 /bin/bash
```

Run nginx in docker container

Suggested posts: