Dreamwidth is the completely wrong audience for this. I don't care. I'm writing this anyway.

Problem

You have a Docker setup, perhaps self-hosted on a cheap piece of hardware that lives under your bed^[1]. You also have a few static HTML projects that you want to host, each of which should live on its own domain.

How do?

Constraints

• Must be as small as possible. I'm not running a 1GB image just to serve a handful of HTML files.
• Must be a single Docker image. See above; I'm not spinning up a container for a single HTML file!
• Must be done with Docker Compose, specifically OpenMediaVault's Compose plugin. (OMV is an opensource OS for homebrew NAS setups. I like having a GUI.)

Solution

A Docker Compose setup based on nginx:alpine, and an nginx config file for each domain ("virtual host" or "vhost").

services:
  nginx:
    restart: always
    image: nginx:alpine
    ports:
      - 8030:80
      # 8030 is the port where the reverse proxy will redirect all annathecrow.net traffic.
    volumes:
    # CHANGE_TO_COMPOSE_DATA_PATH is a constant of the OMV Compose plugin; it points to the /compose-data folder where you can dump whatever data you need for your containers. 
      - CHANGE_TO_COMPOSE_DATA_PATH/static-hosting/nginx/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro
      # I have to override the default nginx config - the initial setup is finicky, but you do it once and you're set (see below).
      - CHANGE_TO_COMPOSE_DATA_PATH/static-hosting/nginx/sites:/etc/nginx/sites:ro
      # Folder with site configs
      - CHANGE_TO_COMPOSE_DATA_PATH/static-hosting/data:/var/www
      # folder with site data

nginx.conf

Quick run-down if you've never used nginx to host things: you create a config block in a separate config file for each site in /etc/nginx/sites-available, then you symlink them into /etc/nginx/sites-enabled, and nginx sucks them in automatically.

Only, nginx:alpine does not do that. This is apparently a feature only on Ubuntu (maybe Debian, maybe other distros) - it's literally one include line in nginx.conf and you need to add it if you want to have things work as you're used to.

Because life is suffering, the official nginx Docker image doesn't give you any good way to extend the main config, only overwrite it. So, you need to copy the nginx conf from inside the container, edit it, and then mount it back in.

For reference, this is how my site config (/etc/nginx/sites/annathecrow.net.conf) looks like:

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

        root /var/www/annathecrow.net/html;
        index index.html index.htm;

        server_name annathecrow.net;

        error_log /var/log/nginx/annathecrow.net.error.log
        access_log /var/log/nginx/annathecrow.net.access.log

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

And that's it! I enabled the reverse proxy, and it liiiives!