I have Nginx installed on a Docker container, and am trying to run it like this:
docker run -i -t -p 80:80 mydockerimage /usr/sbin/nginx
The problem is that the way Nginx works, is that the initial process immediately spawns a master Nginx process and some workers, and then quits. Since Docker is only watching the PID of the original command, the container then halts.
How do I prevent the container from halting? I need to be able to tell it to bind to the first child process, or stop Nginx's initial process from exiting.
nginx
, like all well-behaved programs, can be configured not to self-daemonize.
Use the daemon off
configuration directive described in http://wiki.nginx.org/CoreModule.
To expand on Charles Duffy's answer, Nginx uses the daemon off
directive to run in the foreground. If it's inconvenient to put this in the configuration file, we can specify it directly on the command line. This make it easy to run in debug mode (foreground) and directly switch to running in production mode (background) by changing command line args.
To run in foreground:
nginx -g 'daemon off;'
To run in background:
nginx
To expand on John's answer you can also use the Dockerfile
CMD
command as following (in case you want it to self start without additional args)
CMD ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]
Adding this command to Dockerfile can disable it:
RUN echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Here you have an example of a Dockerfile that runs nginx. As mentionned by Charles, it uses the daemon off
configuration:
https://github.com/darron/docker-nginx-php5/blob/master/Dockerfile#L17
It is also good idea to use supervisord or runit[1] for service management.
[1] https://github.com/phusion/baseimage-docker
To add Tomer and Charles answers,
Syntax to run nginx in forground in Docker container using Entrypoint:
ENTRYPOINT nginx -g 'daemon off;'
Not directly related but to run multiple commands with Entrypoint:
ENTRYPOINT /bin/bash -x /myscripts/myscript.sh && nginx -g 'daemon off;'