In the name of God
I was trying to bring a website on my server from a simple web host. This article is just a resource gathering of opening and reading about 150 browser tabs. I feel I'd need to read this sooner or later again. Hope it's useful.
I am trying to bring a website on my Ubuntu 22.04 server. These are the required stuff:
- Nginx + SSL for the domain
- PHP + Composer
- MariaDB (or MySQL) + PHPMyAdmin
I felt I have to learn Docker at some point so I started here. And I wanted to make my server a little more secure.
First Step
This isn't a step by step guide. Your first step would be to read about all the By DigitalOcean and A Guide Collection by Igor Fomin at Hackernoon links at the Read More section at the bottom of this article. Then, many of your questions would be answered here.
Let's Go
Docker vs Docker Compose
Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications.
docker manages single containers.docker compose manages multiple container applications.
Usage of docker compose requires 3 steps:
- Define the app environment with a Dockerfile
- Define the app services in docker-compose.yml
- Run
docker compose up to start and run app
(Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/50577830/11041841)
Docker Error: HTTP 408 response body: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value
After installing Docker, I tried docker pull hello-world to test it, but got the error:
Error response from daemon: error parsing HTTP 408 response body: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value: "<html><body><h1>408 Request Time-out</h1>\nYour browser didn't send a complete request in time.\n</body></html>\n\n"
The solution (thanks to this StackOverflow answer) was to adjust the MTU.
sudo ip link set dev eth0 mtu 1400
sudo ip enp1s0 mtu 1000 up
You can get your device info to choose the [interface] using:
sudo ip a
Docker Error: You have reached your pull rate limit.
Another error I encountered was this.
This could have had 2 reasons:
- I wasn't logged in to Docker in the CLI.
- US Sanctions on Iran.
I live in Iran 🇮🇷. The heavy weight of the US sanctions are inhuman and annoying.
Login to Docker CLI
First try to [signup at docker.com and] login to the Docker CLI (preferably with a token instead of password for better security) using (Source):
docker login
Using DNS Servers
- Find a DNS service.
- Set the DNS on your Ubuntu.
- Login to Docker CLI and try again.
How to Set DNS on Ubuntu
First read https://askubuntu.com/a/1407182/1636166. if it didn't work, use the following method.
You need to configure the /etc/network/interfaces file if you want to change your DNS server via the command line.
It should look something like this:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
dns-nameservers X.X.X.X
If you have more than one DNS server, just add a space between each:
dns-nameservers X.X.X.X Y.Y.Y.Y Z.Z.Z.Z
Just replace the Xs, Ys, and Zs with your own IPs of the DNS servers of choice, and when this is done, you can run this command to update the settings (ifconfig, ifdown, ifup are deprecated):
sudo ip link set eth0 down && sudo ip link set eth0 up
sudo ifdown eth0 && sudo ifup eth0
Make sure to use these commands in a single line with && to avoid getting stuck out if you're using your system over a network or SSH.
(Source: https://askubuntu.com/a/346845/1636166 & https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/50614/554870 & https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/534879/554870)
From some Docker version on, the Docker Compose command has changed from docker-compose to docker compose, removing the dash.
Starting Docker Compose
There are different commands for this (start, up, run, ...).
In the CLI, go to the folder containing your docker-compose.yml file, then run this to build and run it:
docker compose up
docker compose up -d
docker compose start
docker compose run
docker compose up --build
docker compose up --build --force-recreate
docker compose build --no-cache
The -d option is to start the services detached from the CLI. but If you're running it for the first time, not using this options makes debugging easier, as it shows to logs. If so, you can use Ctrl+C to stop the services.
Together with --force-recreate, you might want to consider using the flag -V too:
-V, --renew-anon-volumes Recreate anonymous volumes instead of retrieving data from the previous containers.
Stopping the Docker Composer Services
There are different commands for this (pause, stop, down).
down & stop
By current official documentation, down stops and removes containers, networks, volumes, and images created by up, if they are already stopped or partially removed and so on, then it will do the trick too.
Docker Compose down command stops all services associated with a Docker Compose configuration. Unlike stop, it also removes any containers and internal networks associated with the services. But NOT internally specified volumes. To do that as well, you need to additionally specify the -v flag after the down command. (Source)
docker compose stop
docker compose down
docker compose down --volumes
docker compose down --rmi <all|local>
`docker rm -f $(docker ps -a -q)`
`docker volume rm $(docker volume ls -q)`
(Source: https://stackoverflow.com/q/32612650/11041841 & https://stackoverflow.com/a/61930747/11041841 & https://linuxhint.com/how-to-clean-up-docker-compose/c)
Another method of resetting is (suggested by this StackOverflow answer):
docker compose rm -f
docker compose pull
And another one (not tested, suggested by this StackOverflow answer):
docker stop $(docker ps -qa)
docker system prune -af --volumes
Running Commands in the Docker Container's Shell
docker attach will let you connect to your Docker container, but this isn't really the same thing as ssh. If your container is running a webserver, for example, docker attach will probably connect you to the stdout of the web server process. It won't necessarily give you a shell.
To run arbitrary commands inside an existing container (Source):
docker exec -it <container_id> bash
Of course, whatever command you are running must exist in the container filesystem.
In the above command <container_id> is the name or ID of the target container. It doesn't matter whether or not you're using docker compose; just run docker ps and use either the ID (a hexadecimal string displayed in the first column) or the name (displayed in the final column).
docker exec only works on running containers (otherwise use docker run -it --entrypoint /bin/bash or similar).
-it means:
-i, --interactive: Keep STDIN open even if not attached.-t,--tty: Allocate a pseudo-TTY.
PHP-fpm
When setting up PHP in my nginx config, I was using the following config, as I normally would without docker:
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
}
But it gave me an error:
nginx: [emerg] open() "/etc/nginx/snippets/fastcgi-php.conf" failed (2: No such file or directory)
This answer on StackOverflow recommended the following, and it worked:
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name;
}
The important part of the answer is changing include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf to include fastcgi_params.
SSL & Certbot
After trying a bit, I finally concluded that for my case, the best way to use HTTPS/SSL on my website it to use the nginx on the host OS, rather than the nginx in the docker container, and then reverse proxy to it.
But here are some useful links:
And when using the certbot --nginx command, I encountered this error:
The requested nginx plugin does not appear to be installed
If you could, install the python3-certbot-nginx package.
sudo apt-get install python3-certbot-nginx
Or you can not use --nginx and manually add the certificates to the nginx config.
(Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/64571234/11041841 & https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/1736)
Also Read Nginx and Let’s Encrypt with Docker in Less Than 5 Minutes (pentacent.medium.com).
Little Facts
- To install packages in the container, we can use the ol'
Dockerfile (Source)
- The Nginx config should not be named
default.conf. (Source)
Read More
By DigitalOcean
A Guide Collection by Igor Fomin at Hackernoon
The GitHub Repo: https://github.com/ikknd/docker-study
GitHub Gists & Repos
Other References