2017-12-22

Pelican and Ansible make a nice way to build docker containers

I’ve migrated a few of my static sites to run in Nginx Docker containers. I can’t help but not make some customizations to the containers themselves and the host. Before using Docker I used ansible to control my serves. I found it rather easy to convert Ansible into working with Docker.

When I started playing around with Docker I didn’t care for having to learn another provisioning tool. So I’ve been using Ansible as orchestration and for container provisioning.

I didn’t care for using the Docker container extension with ansible. I found the design having a “conductor” container as well as the container being built to be a bit clunky. Instead I grabbed a packer binary and with a bit of json I have it run the build process and packer runs a playbook inside the contianer and exports as a tar or upto a repository.