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.
Learning Objectives
Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:
- Create the Container
Launch an Alpine Linux 3.11 container, called
web01:lxc launch images:alpine/3.11 web01- Configure nginx
Access the container’s shell:
lxc exec web01 -- ashUpdate the container and install
nginx:apk update apk add nginxConfigure
nginxto start at boot:rc-service nginx start && rc-update add nginx defaultUpdate the
nginxconfiguration to serve content out of/var/www/hubat port 80:vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.confserver { listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server; root /var/www/hub/; }Exit the container:
exit- Deploy the Website
Push the website to the container:
lxc file push hub/ web01/var/www/ --create-dirs -rThen restart nginx:
lxc exec web01 -- rc-service nginx restartWe can confirm this work by running
curlagainst the private IP of our container:lxc list curl <container-ip-from-list>- Snapshot the Container
Take a snapshot of the
web01container:lxc snapshot web01 1.0- 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>:80To confirm visit the public IP of your provided server.
