Automated build of Varnish and Nginx with Docker for basic testing of Varnish PURGE

Varnish environment variables

Varnish will be configured by default to cache requests for nginx running on localhost by using the following environment variables.

    NGINX_PORT 8082 
    VARNISH_BACKEND_IP 127.0.0.1
    VARNISH_PORT 80

Build the docker image by yourself

If you prefer you can easily build the docker image by yourself. After this the image is ready for use on your machine and can be used for multiple starts.

$ cd varnish-docker
$ sudo docker build -t desired_repo/varnish .

Start the container

The container has all pre requisites set up to run any varnish application. Specify all needed environment variables.

$ sudo docker run -i -d -p 80 -e NGINX_PORT=8082 desired_repo/varnish

Start the container and keep control

The command above starts the container in deamon mode (-d) and runs in the background. If you want to start it by yourself just to see what happens use this command:

$ sudo docker run -i -t -p 80 -e NGINX_PORT=8082 desired_repo/varnish bash

Notice the two changes made here, first we replaced the deamon switch (-d) with the tty switch (-t) which pipes the std in and std out to your terminal.

You now end up as a root user in the docker container and can do simple things like ls, cd and more. More complex things can be achieved after a apt-get install of one or more software(s) of choice.

Get the container ip and port

The first command inspects your created container and get the IPv4 address. Second command docker exported port for 8080.

$ sudo docker inspect <container_id> | grep IPAddress | cut -d '"' -f 4
$ sudo docker port <container_id> 80 | cut -d ":" -f2

Now go to <your container's ip>:<container's port> in your browser

Stop the container

Stopping a running container is possible via the docker api. If only one instance of this container is running this command will stop it:

$ sudo docker stop `sudo docker ps |grep jacksoncage/varnish |cut -d\  -f1`