Serving a Website from a LXD Container

Launch an Alpine Linux 3.18 container, called web01:

lxc launch images:alpine/3.18 web01

Access the container's shell:

lxc exec web01 -- ash

Update the container and install nginx:

apk update
apk add nginx

Configure nginx to start at boot:

rc-service nginx start && rc-update add nginx default

Update the nginx configuration to serve content out of /var/www/hub at port 80:

vi /etc/nginx/http.d/default.conf

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;


        root /var/www/hub/;
}

Exit the container:

exit

Push the website to the container:

lxc file push hub/ web01/var/www/ --create-dirs -r

Then restart nginx:

lxc exec web01 -- rc-service nginx restart

We can confirm this work by running curl against the private IP of our container:

lxc list
curl <container-ip-from-list>

Take a snapshot of the web01 container:

lxc snapshot web01 1.0

Ensure that when the host's IP is accessed, it forwards to the container:

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to <container_ip>:80

To confirm visit the public IP of your provided server.