When developing websites locally, I often use a simple Python web server to observe the changes.

python3 -m http.server

However, this approach has its limitations. For example, this approach does not enable logging or access controls. You also need to customize SimpleHTTPServer if you have advanced needs from your web server.

So, I went to find an alternative that is almost as easy and far more extensible and found Docker Desktop to be a suitable replacement.

Docker Desktop

Installation

Docker Desktop is a desktop GUI for the phenomenal Docker container software. This allows you to manage containers, images, volumes, environments, and extensions via an easy-to-use GUI.

To install, open the link above and click the Download button for your platform. I'm going through this process on an M2 Macbook, so I downloaded the Mac - Apple Chip version.

Open the installer and follow the installation process until the application finishes the installation process.

Creating an Nginx Container

I prefer to use the command line to create containers, so the following commands will be input via the terminal.

The following command will create a container, using the nginx image:

1. -d: Run this container as a daemon (detach)
2. -p: Allocate a port in the format <external>:<internal>
3. -i: Keep STDIN open even if not attached
4. -t: Allocate a pseudo-TTY
5. -p: Allocate a port in the format <external>:<internal>
6. --rm: Remove the container once it's done running

docker run -it --rm -d -p 8000:80 --name web nginx

You can navigate to http://localhost:8000 to see the resulting page.

Customizing the Nginx Container

Now that I have a container running the Nginx web server, I need to link some volumes so that I can modify the site configuration and provide the web files to serve.

Let's start with the new command, which adds two volumes:

1. <your_content>:/usr/share/nginx/html: This is the directory where you will provide the web pages for the server to serve.
2. <your_config>:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf: This is the Nginx configuration file for your site.

To see the updates, you can delete the previous container in the GUI or run docker stop web to stop the container. Once stopped, you can run the new docker run command below.

docker run -it -d -p 8000:80 --name web -v ~/Source/cleberg.net/.build:/usr/share/nginx/html -v ~/Source/cleberg.net/nginx-config.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf nginx

Here's an example of my development configuration file.

# nginx-config.conf
server {
       server_name cleberg.net www.cleberg.net;

       root /usr/share/nginx/html;
       index index.html;
       autoindex on;

       access_log  /var/log/nginx/cleberg.net.access.log;
       error_log  /var/log/nginx/cleberg.net.error.log;

       location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
       }

       listen [::]:80;
       listen 80;
}

Customizing Deployment Actions

I am currently blogging with weblorg, which uses a custom publish.el file to build the static site. Within this file, I have configured my deployment process to check for the ENV variable in thesh and if it's set to prod, the script will set the base URLs to https://cleberg.net. If not, it sets the base URLs to localhost:8000 (which matches the port used in the container above).

Therefore, I have modified my build.sh script to build with localhost URLs if ENV is not set to prod. It also prevents the build process from sending the built files to the production web server.

#!/bin/bash

if [ "$ENV" == "prod" ]; then
    echo "Environment = Production"              && \
    rm -rf .build/*                              && \
    emacs --script publish.el                    && \
    scp -r .build/* ubuntu:/var/www/cleberg.net/
else
    echo "Environment = Development"             && \
    rm -rf .build/*                              && \
    emacs --script publish.el
fi

You can modify the container in numerous ways and this approach allows you to create complex scenarios for your web development purposes. I highly recommend switching over to a container-based approach for simple, local web development.