How to Run an Nginx Web Server Container with Custom Directory and Settings

Kacper Bąk
2 min readMar 25, 2023
Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash

When it comes to running a web server, containerization can be a convenient way to isolate and manage the server’s resources. In this article, I will go through the steps to run an Nginx web server container with a custom directory and settings, including automatically deleting the container when closed, listening on port 8080, and limiting container memory to 256 MB.

To start, I will use the docker run command to start a new container. Here is the full command:

docker run --rm -p 8080:80 -m 256m -v /tmp/webpage/:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro nginx

Let’s break down the command and its parameters:

  • docker run: Command to run a new container.
  • --rm: Automatically remove the container when it exits.
  • -p 8080:80: Map port 80 from the container to port 8080 on the host.
  • -m 256m: Limit the container's memory to 256MB.
  • -v /tmp/webpage/:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro: Mount the directory /tmp/webpage/ on the host to /usr/share/nginx/html the container instr read-only mode.
  • nginx: Name of the Nginx image to run.

By default, Nginx serves content from the /usr/share/nginx/html directory, which is where I've mounted…

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