Nginx, Express, Redis and nodemon

We've taken the setup from step 02 and made the app accessible through an Nginx server running in its own container.

This step is heavily inspired by RealPython's excellent blog post Django Development With Docker Compose and Machine.

Prerequisites

Install Docker on your system.

Install instructions for Mac OS X
Install instructions for Ubuntu Linux
Install instructions for other platforms

Install Docker Compose on your system.

Python/pip: sudo pip install -U docker-compose
Other: curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.1.0/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/docker-compose; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Setup

Run docker-compose build. It will

build the container for our Express app from step 02
build the container for the Nginx server

Start

Run docker-compose up to create and start the web, nginx and db containers. The app should then be running on your docker daemon on standard http port 80 (On OS X you can use boot2docker ip to find out the IP address).

You should see a counter on the index page which will be incremented in Redis on every request. See app/routes/index.js to learn how to conect to Redis via enviroment variables exposed to the web container.

Notes on boot2docker

It appears that boot2docker (OS X, Windows) currently does not automatically sync the system clock with the host system after a host resumes from sleep. This becomes a problem due to the way nodemon detects file changes. That might cause it to go bananas, if the clocks on both systems are "too much" out of sync. Until this is fixed, you might use this workaround or simply do a manual sync via

/usr/local/bin/boot2docker ssh sudo ntpclient -s -h pool.ntp.org