Configuring HTTPD server on Docker Container and setting up Python Interpreter

Last Updated : 20 Feb, 2023

In this article, we are going to discuss a step-by-step guide on how to configure the apache web server on top of a docker container, and setting up a Python interpreter. Basically, we are installing the product of apache which is HTTPD on the docker container.

What is Docker?

In simple words, if I have to define docker, is a tool that can launch an operating system (install any operating system) in seconds. If you have noticed when we install any operating system it takes around one hour to launch, but docker giving you the facility the convenience to launch any os within seconds, and httpd is just a product of apache web service which we are using for creating webpages.

Prerequisites:

You need Virtual Box installed in your os
And launch one Linux operating system(RHEL-8, Linux (64-bit)) in the VM to perform this practice.
Yum, should be configured in your VM.

How to configure the HTTPD server on the Docker Container?

First, we need to install docker in your VM so for that first use the following command to go inside the repo folder.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

Create a repo by giving any name by the command vim d.repo and give this URL. You have to add this URL in the docker repo as you can see below.

toDocker repo

After this, you can install docker by using the below command:

yum install docker-ce  --nobest

To check docker installed or not run the command:

rpm -q docker-ce

To start the service and to check the status of docker you can run the following commands:

Start docker service:

systemctl start docker

Check docker status:

systemctl status docker

Now to configure the webserver on the top of the docker container these are the steps:

Launch a docker container with an image
Inside which we install the webserver program(Apache server)
Starting the server
Inside the docker, we install python interpreter(python3)

Before launching the container in docker make sure to stop firewall and then restart docker.

Stop Firewalld

Now to launch one os /container on the top of docker we need an image you can use the image, we are using the ubuntu: 20.10 image, you can get it from https://hub.docker.com/, to download the image we have to use just one command

docker pull ubuntu:20.10

Now you can launch the container by this image: docker run -i -t -name taskd ubuntu:20.10, the command to come out of the container is exit, you can check how many oses stopped and running also by using the command:

docker ps -a

Lunch docker container

To go inside the exited docker container we have one command docker attach taskd here taskd is the name which you give while launching the container, you can give any name as per you want. Before you go inside the container you have to first start the stopped container by below the command:

docker start taskd

Going inside the docker container

Now we can start the installation in the docker container first we use the command apt-get update, this command is used to download package information from all configured sources. So when you run the update command, it downloads the package information from the Internet. It is useful to get information on an updated version of packages or their dependencies.

apt-get update

Now we can install an apache web server on the top of docker container by the command, apt-get install apache2, in ubuntu we have this command apt-get to download and install any software.

Installing webserver(Apache) on the container

Now we have to install systemctl by using the command:

apt-get install systemctl

Installing systemctl command in container

The command: apt-get install net-tools will help you to run the ifconfig commands.

Installing net-tools

Running ifconfig to see IP

Use the below command to install vim:

apt-get install vim

Install vim to create a file

Now after this installation part gets done we have to configure the webserver we need to go to cd /var/www/html/ and there we have to create a website using vim hello.html.