In this series of posts I will show you how to set up a GitHub Action that will be triggered when you commit to the repository. The Action in particular will test the code, create a Docker image and publish it to the docker hub. Next we will use NGINX server in Ubuntu it as a reverse proxy to run our Docker image downloaded from Docker Hub and run through D_ocker Compose_ on a custom port exposed to the outside through NGINX.
I often find myself creating repositories on GitHub to study new topics or simply to keep a track of what I have learned and I want to be able to reuse it or maybe share it. For the need I bought a virtual server where I installed Ubuntu server in order to be able to publish the result of the projects as they evolve.
This configuration is not always necessary, in fact it is possible to use alternative and free solutions, within certain limits, such as the free tiers of Azure or AWS or Heroku (which offers a lot for free). Maybe in a dedicated post I will talk about these alternatives in detail…
In the past I have used pipelines with TravisCI or Jenkins but now that GitHub offers the possibility to create pipelines for free, I think it is very convenient to use a single environment to automate the phase of testing, creating images and publishing the content online. In this way, every time our project is enriched with new features, we will be able to publish on our server, or where we prefer, in complete safety and in an automated and repeatable way.
In this series of posts we will refer to a scenario where we will run the ostack that we are going to create, even if consisting of a single container, on an Ubuntu server, even locally if you want, using NGINX and Docker.
The application we are going to transform into a container will be an initial Angular project obtained using the CLI.
The articles will be structured in this order:
- Part 1 - What is a GitHub action and how to setup it
- Part 2 - How to build and publish a Docker image from your repository with GitHub Actions
- Part 3 - How to pull and run the published Docker image on NGINX using Docker Compose
Stay tuned for the first article that will talk about what GitHub Actions are and how to set them up for free on your open source project.