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Wycliffe A. Onyango
Wycliffe A. Onyango

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100 Days of DevOps: Day 44

#devops #linux #docker #containers

Hosting a Containerized Web Server

This article details the successful deployment of a containerized static website using Docker Compose on App Server 1. The process involved creating a docker-compose.yml file to define the service, handling a command not found error for docker-compose, and finally, launching the container.

Step 1: Creating the Docker Compose File

The first step was to define the container's configuration using a docker-compose.yml file. This file specifies the image to use, the container's name, port mappings, and volume mounts.

The following content was created in the file located at /opt/docker/docker-compose.yml:

version: '3'
services:
  webserver:
    image: httpd:latest
    container_name: httpd
    ports:
      - "8082:80"
    volumes:
      - "/opt/finance:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs"
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This configuration ensures:

  • The httpd:latest image is used.
  • The container is named httpd.
  • Host port 8082 is mapped to the container's port 80.
  • The host directory /opt/finance is mounted as a volume to the container's /usr/local/apache2/htdocs directory, which is the default location for web content.

Step 2: Troubleshooting Docker Compose Installation

An initial attempt to run the command resulted in the error sudo: docker-compose: command not found. This indicated that the Docker Compose tool was not installed on the system. To resolve this, Docker Compose was installed by downloading the standalone binary and making it executable.

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
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This process installed the latest version of Docker Compose to a system-wide location and gave it the necessary permissions to run.

Step 3: Deploying the Container

With Docker Compose now available, the next step was to run the command from the /opt/docker directory to start the container in detached mode.

Command:

docker compose up -d
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Output:

WARN[0000] /opt/docker/docker-compose.yml: the attribute `version` is obsolete, it will be ignored, please remove it to avoid potential confusion 
[+] Running 7/7
 ✔ webserver Pulled                                                         6.7s 
... (layers pulled) ...
[+] Running 2/2
 ✔ Network docker_default  Created                                          0.5s 
 ✔ Container httpd         Started                                          2.4s
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The command successfully pulled the httpd image, created a network, and started the container named httpd. The warning about the version attribute is informational and does not affect the container's operation.

The httpd container is now running and serving the static website content from the /opt/finance directory on port 8082. This successfully completes the task of hosting the static content on a containerized platform as required by the application development team.

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