Lab
A Cloud Guru

Serving a Website from a LXD Container

Containers can serve many purposes, but one of the most common is serving websites. In this hands-on lab, we'll leverage everyday LXD commands to initialize a container, configure it to serve a website, and snapshot it so we can later deploy a cluster if desired.

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Path Info

Level

Beginner

Duration

30m

Published

Apr 03, 2020

Challenge

Create the Container
Launch an Alpine Linux 3.18 container, called web01:
```
lxc launch images:alpine/3.18 web01
```

Challenge

Configure nginx

Access the container's shell:

lxc exec web01 -- ash

Update the container and install nginx:

apk update
apk add nginx

Configure nginx to start at boot:

rc-service nginx start && rc-update add nginx default

Update the nginx configuration to serve content out of /var/www/hub at port 80:

vi /etc/nginx/http.d/default.conf

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;


        root /var/www/hub/;
}

Exit the container:

exit

Challenge

Deploy the Website
Push the website to the container:
```
lxc file push hub/ web01/var/www/ --create-dirs -r
```
Then restart nginx:
```
lxc exec web01 -- rc-service nginx restart
```
We can confirm this work by running curl against the private IP of our container:
```
lxc list
curl <container-ip-from-list>
```
Challenge

Snapshot the Container
Take a snapshot of the web01 container:
```
lxc snapshot web01 1.0
```
Challenge

Map Ports
Ensure that when the host's IP is accessed, it forwards to the container:
```
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to <container_ip>:80
```
To confirm visit the public IP of your provided server.

Author

A Cloud Guru

The Cloud Content team comprises subject matter experts hyper focused on services offered by the leading cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure), as well as cloud-related technologies such as Linux and DevOps. The team is thrilled to share their knowledge to help you build modern tech solutions from the ground up, secure and optimize your environments, and so much more!

What's a lab?

Hands-on Labs are real environments created by industry experts to help you learn. These environments help you gain knowledge and experience, practice without compromising your system, test without risk, destroy without fear, and let you learn from your mistakes. Hands-on Labs: practice your skills before delivering in the real world.