This is my first crack at web development. I'll be following along Mozilla's guide and building off of that. This README will be working notes on things I discover along the way. Hopefully other newbies can also get some useful information from my example.
Another goal was to understand how web-servers work. Since Docker is the Hot New Thing, why not leverage it to make a standalone project?
First, make sure you have a Docker runtime on your machine. On OSX, there is Docker toolbox. For a webserver, there is an official Apache image.
With docker-machine, you have a virtual machine which hosts the containers that execute your
code. For a container that runs a webserver, you need to do 2 things before you can view the content
in your browser:
- Forward relevant ports from within the docker container
- Identify the IP address of your
docker-machineVM to connect to via the browser
Assuming you are using apache's httpd image, run your container like this:
docker run -it --rm -p 80:80 --name my-apache-app -v "$PWD":/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ httpd:2.4
Notice the -p 80:80. This exposes port 80 in the running container to the outside world, so you
can connect to it. See Docker
docs for more.
Get a list of all running Docker VMs and their IP addresses with docker-machine ls. If you are new
to Docker, you probably just have one, labeled default. If you are running a Docker container with
forwarded ports, you should be able to enter that address into your browser (don't specify a port),
and see the content you want to serve.
Interactive content usually requires some input from the user. That content generally has to go somewhere else to be processed. This requires routing.
CGI seems like a lightweight way to work with
content interactively. With the Apache container httpd, CGI scripts can be placed in
/usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin. Then, specify the name of the script in the action attribute of a
form element, like so:
<form action="my-cgi-script.py">