How to deploy website to openshift with nginx?

Although Openshift is able to use docker images, it has much more restrictions like no root user. Thus not all docker images can work straight on Openshift. Unfortunately, the official nginx docker image does not work on openshift.

In this post, I will simply go through how to run this Official RedHat nginx image on Openshift and deploy a website onto it.

So, have your openshift cli tool (oc) ready, let’s get started.

Step 1 - Create App / Deploy website source code

With oc tool, create a new app.

#oc new-app [BuilderImage]~[Source Code Repo]
oc new-app registry.access.redhat.com/rhscl/nginx-112-rhel7~https://github.com/Keyang/keyang.github.io.git --name=myapp

The openshift will pull the image from the registry and register it locally as builder image which will allow building images along with source code of website. It creates build config.

Then it will pull source code and assemble it with build image to produce another image stream.

This command will also create deployment config and service.

Build Local Source

If you have no accessible git repo, it is able to build againt local source.

Slightly different, create a new app on current folder

#oc new-app [BuilderImage]~[Source Code Repo]
oc new-app nginx-112-rhel7~./ --name=myapp

This will not actually upload the source code from current folder to Openshift but just create a build config. Thus we need to start the build with extra parameters:

oc start-build myapp --from-dir=./

with --from-dir param, oc will upload content of current directory and builder image will assemble the code.

Step 2 - Expose Nginx Server

Once app is created and built, we could expose it through router.

oc expose svc/myapp

Once it is exposed, your nginx server and your website should be accessible with the route associated.