nginx Dockerfile

Docker image for nginx. Both mainline and stable releases are supported; the latest tag uses the mainline nginx release per the nginx maintainer recommendations. All available tags on Docker Hub are:

Docker Hub tag	nginx release
latest	mainline
mainline	mainline
stable	stable
1.7	mainline
1.6	stable

Differences from the official Docker image:

• Enables environment variable interpolation in config files (thanks to scripts taken from shepmaster/nginx-template-image)
• Provides a stable tag (the official Docker nginx image only provides the mainline/development version of nginx).
• Uses the Ubuntu PPA installation path, so there are some extra compiled modules available.
• Sets worker_processes to auto. This value should typically be set to the number of cores on the machine. Because the Debian/Ubuntu installers set this at install-time to a static value equal to the detected number of cores on the machine, many Docker images get this wrong. auto means nginx will attempt to detect the number of cores when nginx starts up.
• Bypass copy-on-write (COW) filesystem for /var/cache/nginx and /var/log/nginx directories. This should result in better write performance in the locations nginx modifies.
• Change default config to read configuration from /data directories (see configuration section for more info).

Basic usage

$ docker run -d -p 8080:80 abevoelker/nginx
$ curl -I http://localhost:8080
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.7.7
Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 03:44:27 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 867
Last-Modified: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 03:38:48 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "545ee1c8-363"
Accept-Ranges: bytes

or, if you prefer the stable version of nginx:

$ docker run -d -p 8080:80 abevoelker/nginx:stable
$ curl -I http://localhost:8080
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.6.2
Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 03:45:35 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 867
Last-Modified: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 03:42:09 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "545ee291-363"
Accept-Ranges: bytes

Configuration

sites-enabled

Site configuration files go in /data/sites-enabled/:

$ ls /tmp/sites-enabled
example.com
$ docker run -v /tmp/sites-enabled:/data/sites-enabled:ro abevoelker/nginx

If you need environment variable interpolation in your site configs, put the files in /data/sites-templates with a .tmpl extension and they will be copied to /data/sites-enabled/ with the .tmpl extension removed. See shepmaster/nginx-template-image for more info.

nginx.conf

If you have a custom nginx.conf, just mount it to /data/conf/nginx.conf:

$ docker run -v /tmp/conf/my_nginx.conf:/data/conf/nginx.conf:ro abevoelker/nginx

If for some reason you don't want to store the file as /data/conf/nginx.conf, you'll need to change the default run command to reference it:

$ docker run -v /tmp/foo:/foo abevoelker/nginx nginx -c /foo/nginx.conf

When rolling your own config, be sure to check out the nginx.conf provided with this image for Docker-specific tweaks that may be helpful. And note that if you change the base image, it may not provide the /dev/stdout and /dev/stderr special files.

conf.d

Extra .conf files go in /data/conf.d/:

$ docker run -v /tmp/conf.d:/data/conf.d:ro abevoelker/nginx

Note that the default base nginx.conf is configured to only include files in this directory with the suffix .conf.

Makefile

There's a Makefile with make build included as a shorthand for building the image. By default it will build the mainline version of nginx; if you prefer the stable version, do make build VERSION=stable.

There are also REGISTRY and TAG variables available, so e.g. make build REGISTRY=example.com TAG=foo will build the image example.com/abevoelker/nginx:foo.

There's also a make pull included as a shorthand for pulling the image. By default pulls the latest tag but you can provide your own, e.g. make pull TAG=stable.

License

MIT license.