Docker compose managed test harness

Example for a blog post about nginx docker compose

Setup

To run this you will execute one of the following commands depending on your build source:

Local Build

To build from local directories, run:

./build_local.sh

This setup allows for hot-swapping of code. Any changes made in the repo_refs directories will be immediately reflected in the running containers, allowing developers to see their changes in real-time via the nginx server.

GitHub Build

Prerequisites:

• This requires a github token with access to the repos. As such we need to add an ENV var GH_TOKEN. You can add this to your local shell or directing into the .env

To build from GitHub repositories, run:

./build_github.sh

The GitHub build process is isolated from the local development environment, ensuring a clean and isolated build environment. This prevents any potential conflicts with local volumes.

CircleCi Oddities

You'll notice that the build_github.sh script does not share volumes to inject the default.conf into nginx. This is because circleci does not allow volume sharing between the host and the docker executor. This is a limitation of the circleci platform, and not a limitation of docker. As such we copy the nginx file into the container after the build process and restart the nginx service.

CircleCI is also not a huge fan of docker compose port forwarding, so we run the tests from inside their docker container to be able to access the ngninx service on the network.

Once Built

Once the container is up and running, you can hit http://localhost:8089/ it / will route you to FE react project by default.

http://localhost:8089/backend/ will route you to the backend service.

http://localhost:8089/api/ will route you to the backend service with the api path.