Web Server in Docker Container using Ansible

3 min readSep 18, 2023

We all know how Ansible has changed the IT workflow game, The use case of Anbile to configure heavy-duty tasks in multiple servers is what makes today's IT world efficient and consistent. In this blog, we’ll see how we can use Ansible to configure docker services and launch a web page,

Introduction:-

1. Apache Webserver:-

Apache is an open-source and free web server software that powers around 40% of websites around the world. The official name is Apache HTTP Server is an open-source and free web server software that powers around 40% of websites around the world. The official name is Apache HTTP Server, and it’s maintained and developed by the Apache Software Foundation.
It allows website owners to serve content on the web — hence the name “web server.” It’s one of the oldest and most reliable web servers.
When someone wants to visit a website, they enter a domain name into the address bar of their browser. Then, the web server delivers the requested files by acting as a virtual delivery man.

1. Docker:-

Docker is an open-source containerization platform. Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and deploy it as one package.

2. Ansible:-

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration .

Pre-requisites

A controller node and one Managed node is configured. In the controller node, ansible is pre-installed.
Now first let’s create an inventory file. Where all the information about the target/Managed node will be stored. In the inventory file, we can store multiple IPs. Here I create one redhat 8 cli os as managed node .

Inventory file

Ansible-configuration file

Here host_key_checking=false [ used to auto accept ssh key by Managed Node]

command_warnings=False [disable command warnings]

deprecation_warnings=False [ to disable deprecation warnings]

Let’ Started

First we can verify that our managed node is reachable or not

ansible all -m ping

Our system is working fine.

Now I create a playbook using ansible module to configure webserver on the top of docker

I Created a docker container web3 and use Image httpd. The container will run in background by detach option.
The container is exposed at port 80 on which webserver is running and forward container port 80 to base redhat 8 port 8080 .
We cannot directly login to container . So I mount base directory /root/WS of redhat 8 to container directory /usr/local/apache2/htdocs ( location of webpages of httpd image) and directly copy webpage from controller node to managed node .

We can run playbook by