Homework assignment HW5

Homework log

Remember to create a new post with a new topic “HW5” in your homework log channel on Microsoft Teams. Make a reply to that topic whenever do some work on this assignment. You can also post questions there. Your posts should provide evidence that you spent several hours doing meaningful work.

Objectives

This assignment is designed to give you some experience with Docker, a popular containerization platform. You will learn how to install Docker, build a simple web server image, and run it in a container. As a preliminary to installing Docker on your Linux machine, you will install and run a web server on your Linux machine.

Minimal knowledge and experience to acquire:

1. Install and run a web server on your Linux machine.

• install apache2 on on your Linux system
• launch apache web server: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
• Configure the web server so that you can visit its default page (see e.g. the Apache on GCP page).
• Edit the default page at /var/www/html/index.html. Don’t edit the file as root user. Practice adding yourself to a group that has write access to the file, and then edit it as a normal user.
  • Commands similar to the following should work. Make sure you understand them all:

        sudo groupadd www
        sudo usermod -a -G www yourusername
        cd /var/www
        sudo chgrp -R www html
        sudo chmod -R g+w html
    

  • The Linux machine probably needs a reboot so that the new group permissions work correctly.

2. Install Docker Engine (not Docker Desktop) on the Linux box, and run a simple web server in a Docker container.

• see e.g. Install using the convenience script
• Verify Docker installation by running docker run hello-world
• Build a Docker image that runs a simple web server (e.g. nginx or httpd) and serves a simple HTML page. You can use the following Dockerfile as a starting point:

    FROM nginx:alpine
    COPY index.html /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html
  

  • Create an index.html file with some content of your choice.
  • Build the image using docker build -t my-web-server .
  • Run the container using docker run -d -p 8080:80 my-web-server
  • Verify that you can access the web page at http://localhost:8080 or http://<your-linux-box-ip>:8080
    • e.g., curl http://localhost:8080 or curl http://<your-linux-box-ip>:8080
• practice using docker ps, docker stop, docker start, and docker rm commands to manage your container; also docker images and docker rmi to manage your images; docker inspect to inspect your container and image, e.g. docker inspect <container name> | grep IPAddress

3. Be familiar with the differences between a virtual machine, a Docker image, a Docker container, and a Dockerfile.

PB version

The Professor Braught version is available as:

• 05-A-Docker.docx Unless you already have familiarity with the above commands, it is a good idea to follow the PB version closely for this assignment.

Likely quiz questions

• What is the difference between a container and a virtual machine?
• What is the difference between a Docker image and a Docker container?
• What is the difference between a Dockerfile and a Docker image?
• Explain each of the following Linux terminal commands:

  sudo groupadd www
  sudo usermod -a -G www yourusername
  sudo chgrp -R www html
  sudo chmod -R g+w html