Alpine Nginx

This Nginx docker image is based on Alpine. Alpine is based on Alpine Linux, lightweight Linux distribution based on BusyBox. The size of the image is very small, less than 10 MB!

Getting The Image

This image is published in the Docker Hub. Simply run this command below to get it to your machine.

docker pull matriphe/alpine-nginx:php-fpm

docker pull matriphe/alpine-nginx:html

Alternatively you can clone this repository and build the image using the docker build command.

Build

This image use Asia/Jakarta timezone by default. You can change the timezone by change the TIMEZONE environment on Dockerfile and then build.

docker -t repository/imagename:tag Dockerfile

Configuration

The site data, config, and log data is configured to be located in a Docker volume so that it is persistent and can be shared by other containers or a backup container).

There are three volumes defined in this image, /etc/nginx/conf.d, /var/log/nginx, and /www.

/etc/nginx/conf.d to store the virtual server configurations
/var/log/nginx to store the logs, by default, only errors that are logged
/www to store virtual directory data

You can store the sites data to this directory structure:

/www
├─── website1_files
|    └ ...
└─── website2_files
     └ ...
/etc
└─── nginx
	 └─── conf.d
	 	  ├─── website1.conf
	 	  └─── website2.conf

The /etc/nginx/conf.d operates in the same fashion as the regular /etc/nginx/conf.d in Nginx, so place that configurations here.

Nginx Configuration

You can modify the nginx.conf by editing etc/nginx.conf in this repository and rebuild the image. Make sure you include daemon off; in the configuration.

If you link this container using PHP-FPM container, for example, makes sure to build or use php-fpm tag, It will include etc/common.conf that will be called on every site config. You can left the config unchanged, or you can change the phpfpm with the name of yout PHP-FPM container name.

location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass   phpfpm:9000;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}

Virtual Site Configuration

It's very easy to add the virtual site configuration. Just use this configuration template.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name website1.com;
    
    root /www/website1_files;
    index index.html index.htm index.php;

    include /etc/nginx/common.conf;
}

Run The Container

Create and Run The Container

docker run -p 80:80 -p 443:443 --name nginx -v /home/user/nginx/conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d -v /home/user/nginx/log:/var/log/nginx:rw --volumes-from phpfpm --link phpfpm:fpm -d matriphe/alpine-nginx:php-fpm

If you run and want to link PHP-FPM container, make sure you created and run PHP-FPM the container before running this Nginx container. Make sure the /www volume in PHP-FPM container is mapped.

The first -p argument maps the container's port 80 to port 80 on the host, and the second argument maps the container's 443 to the hosts 443 for SSL connection.
--name argument sets the name of the container, useful when starting and stopping the container.
The first -v argument maps the /home/user/nginx/conf directory in the host to /etc/nginx/conf.d in the container, and the second argument maps /home/user/nginx/log directory to /var/log/nginx with read/write access (rw).
--volumes-from argument gets volumes from the phpfpm container and it should have /www mapped.
--link argument allows this container and the phpfpm container to talk to each other over IP.
-d argument runs the container as a daemon.

Stopping The Container

docker stop nginx

Start The Container Again

docker start nginx

matriphe/docker-alpine-nginx