Quick reference

• Maintained by: the NGINX Docker Maintainers

• Where to get help: the Docker Community Forums, the Docker Community Slack, or Stack Overflow

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

• 1.19.6, mainline, 1, 1.19, latest
• 1.19.6-perl, mainline-perl, 1-perl, 1.19-perl, perl
• 1.19.6-alpine, mainline-alpine, 1-alpine, 1.19-alpine, alpine
• 1.19.6-alpine-perl, mainline-alpine-perl, 1-alpine-perl, 1.19-alpine-perl, alpine-perl
• 1.18.0, stable, 1.18
• 1.18.0-perl, stable-perl, 1.18-perl
• 1.18.0-alpine, stable-alpine, 1.18-alpine
• 1.18.0-alpine-perl, stable-alpine-perl, 1.18-alpine-perl

Quick reference (cont.)

• Where to file issues: https://github.com/nginxinc/docker-nginx/issues

• Supported architectures: (more info) amd64, arm32v5, arm32v6, arm32v7, arm64v8, i386, mips64le, ppc64le, s390x

• Published image artifact details: repo-info repo's repos/nginx/ directory (history) (image metadata, transfer size, etc)

• Image updates: official-images PRs with label library/nginx
  official-images repo's library/nginx file (history)

• Source of this description: docs repo's nginx/ directory (history)

What is nginx?

Nginx (pronounced "engine-x") is an open source reverse proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer, HTTP cache, and a web server (origin server). The nginx project started with a strong focus on high concurrency, high performance and low memory usage. It is licensed under the 2-clause BSD-like license and it runs on Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, as well as on other *nix flavors. It also has a proof of concept port for Microsoft Windows.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx

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How to use this image

Hosting some simple static content

$ docker run --name some-nginx -v /some/content:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro -d nginx

Alternatively, a simple Dockerfile can be used to generate a new image that includes the necessary content (which is a much cleaner solution than the bind mount above):

FROM nginx
COPY static-html-directory /usr/share/nginx/html

Place this file in the same directory as your directory of content ("static-html-directory"), run docker build -t some-content-nginx ., then start your container:

$ docker run --name some-nginx -d some-content-nginx

Exposing external port

$ docker run --name some-nginx -d -p 8080:80 some-content-nginx

Then you can hit http://localhost:8080 or http://host-ip:8080 in your browser.

Complex configuration

$ docker run --name my-custom-nginx-container -v /host/path/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro -d nginx

For information on the syntax of the nginx configuration files, see the official documentation (specifically the Beginner's Guide).

If you wish to adapt the default configuration, use something like the following to copy it from a running nginx container:

$ docker run --name tmp-nginx-container -d nginx
$ docker cp tmp-nginx-container:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf /host/path/nginx.conf
$ docker rm -f tmp-nginx-container

This can also be accomplished more cleanly using a simple Dockerfile (in /host/path/):

FROM nginx
COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

If you add a custom CMD in the Dockerfile, be sure to include -g daemon off; in the CMD in order for nginx to stay in the foreground, so that Docker can track the process properly (otherwise your container will stop immediately after starting)!

Then build the image with docker build -t custom-nginx . and run it as follows:

$ docker run --name my-custom-nginx-container -d custom-nginx

Using environment variables in nginx configuration (new in 1.19)

Out-of-the-box, nginx doesn't support environment variables inside most configuration blocks. But this image has a function, which will extract environment variables before nginx starts.

Here is an example using docker-compose.yml:

web:
  image: nginx
  volumes:
   - ./templates:/etc/nginx/templates
  ports:
   - "8080:80"
  environment:
   - NGINX_HOST=foobar.com
   - NGINX_PORT=80

By default, this function reads template files in /etc/nginx/templates/*.template and outputs the result of executing envsubst to /etc/nginx/conf.d.

So if you place templates/default.conf.template file, which contains variable references like this:

listen       ${NGINX_PORT};

outputs to /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf like this:

listen       80;

This behavior can be changed via the following environment variables:

• NGINX_ENVSUBST_TEMPLATE_DIR
  • A directory which contains template files (default: /etc/nginx/templates)
  • When this directory doesn't exist, this function will do nothing about template processing.
• NGINX_ENVSUBST_TEMPLATE_SUFFIX
  • A suffix of template files (default: .template)
  • This function only processes the files whose name ends with this suffix.
• NGINX_ENVSUBST_OUTPUT_DIR
  • A directory where the result of executing envsubst is output (default: /etc/nginx/conf.d)
  • The output filename is the template filename with the suffix removed.
    • ex.) /etc/nginx/templates/default.conf.template will be output with the filename /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.
  • This directory must be writable by the user running a container.

Running nginx in read-only mode

To run nginx in read-only mode, you will need to mount a Docker volume to every location where nginx writes information. The default nginx configuration requires write access to /var/cache and /var/run. This can be easily accomplished by running nginx as follows:

$ docker run -d -p 80:80 --read-only -v $(pwd)/nginx-cache:/var/cache/nginx -v $(pwd)/nginx-pid:/var/run nginx

If you have a more advanced configuration that requires nginx to write to other locations, simply add more volume mounts to those locations.

Running nginx in debug mode

Images since version 1.9.8 come with nginx-debug binary that produces verbose output when using higher log levels. It can be used with simple CMD substitution:

$ docker run --name my-nginx -v /host/path/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro -d nginx nginx-debug -g 'daemon off;'

Similar configuration in docker-compose.yml may look like this:

web:
  image: nginx
  volumes:
    - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro
  command: [nginx-debug, '-g', 'daemon off;']

Entrypoint quiet logs

Since version 1.19.0, a verbose entrypoint was added. It provides information on what's happening during container startup. You can silence this output by setting environment variable NGINX_ENTRYPOINT_QUIET_LOGS:

$ docker run -d -e NGINX_ENTRYPOINT_QUIET_LOGS=1 nginx

User and group id

Since 1.17.0, both alpine- and debian-based images variants use the same user and group ids to drop the privileges for worker processes:

$ id
uid=101(nginx) gid=101(nginx) groups=101(nginx)

Running nginx as a non-root user

It is possible to run the image as a less privileged arbitrary UID/GID. This, however, requires modification of nginx configuration to use directories writeable by that specific UID/GID pair:

$ docker run -d -v $PWD/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf nginx

where nginx.conf in the current directory should have the following directives re-defined:

pid        /tmp/nginx.pid;

And in the http context:

http {
    client_body_temp_path /tmp/client_temp;
    proxy_temp_path       /tmp/proxy_temp_path;
    fastcgi_temp_path     /tmp/fastcgi_temp;
    uwsgi_temp_path       /tmp/uwsgi_temp;
    scgi_temp_path        /tmp/scgi_temp;
...
}

Monitoring nginx with Amplify

Amplify is a free monitoring tool that can be used to monitor microservice architectures based on nginx. Amplify is developed and maintained by the company behind the nginx software.

With Amplify it is possible to collect and aggregate metrics across containers, and present a coherent set of visualizations of the key performance data, such as active connections or requests per second. It is also easy to quickly check for any performance degradations, traffic anomalies, and get a deeper insight into the nginx configuration in general.

In order to use Amplify, a small Python-based agent software (Amplify Agent) should be installed inside the container.

For more information about Amplify, please check the official documentation here.

Image Variants

The nginx images come in many flavors, each designed for a specific use case.

nginx:<version>

This is the defacto image. If you are unsure about what your needs are, you probably want to use this one. It is designed to be used both as a throw away container (mount your source code and start the container to start your app), as well as the base to build other images off of.

nginx:<version>-alpine

This image is based on the popular Alpine Linux project, available in the alpine official image. Alpine Linux is much smaller than most distribution base images (~5MB), and thus leads to much slimmer images in general.

This variant is highly recommended when final image size being as small as possible is desired. The main caveat to note is that it does use musl libc instead of glibc and friends, so certain software might run into issues depending on the depth of their libc requirements. However, most software doesn't have an issue with this, so this variant is usually a very safe choice. See this Hacker News comment thread for more discussion of the issues that might arise and some pro/con comparisons of using Alpine-based images.

To minimize image size, it's uncommon for additional related tools (such as git or bash) to be included in Alpine-based images. Using this image as a base, add the things you need in your own Dockerfile (see the alpine image description for examples of how to install packages if you are unfamiliar).