library/httpd

Quick reference

• Maintained by:
  https://github.com/docker-library/httpd

• Where to get help:
  https://dockr.ly/comm-slack, Server Fault, https://unix.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic, or https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

• https://github.com/docker-library/httpd/blob/4da43810a4429c552e19c43f8e513248c34cfc84/2.4/Dockerfile

• https://github.com/docker-library/httpd/blob/fa08e9cebebdf197ac94126fdfc0bc1680fbfb7c/2.4/alpine/Dockerfile

Quick reference (cont.)

• Where to file issues:
  https://github.com/docker-library/httpd/issues?q=is:issue+is:pr

• Supported architectures: (https://github.com/docker-library/official-images#architectures-other-than-amd64)
  https://hub.docker.com/r/amd64/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/arm32v5/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/arm32v6/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/arm32v7/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/arm64v8/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/i386/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/ppc64le/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/riscv64/httpd/, https://hub.docker.com/r/s390x/httpd/

• Published image artifact details:
  https://github.com/docker-library/repo-info/blob/master/repos/httpd (https://github.com/docker-library/repo-info/commits/master/repos/httpd)
  (image metadata, transfer size, etc)

• Image updates:
  https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/issues?q=label%3Alibrary%2Fhttpd
  https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/blob/master/library/httpd (https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/commits/master/library/httpd)

• Source of this description:
  https://github.com/docker-library/docs/tree/master/httpd (https://github.com/docker-library/docs/commits/master/httpd)

What is httpd?

The Apache HTTP Server, colloquially called Apache, is a Web server application notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. Originally based on the NCSA HTTPd server, development of Apache began in early 1995 after work on the NCSA code stalled. Apache quickly overtook NCSA HTTPd as the dominant HTTP server, and has remained the most popular HTTP server in use since April 1996.

***.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server

How to use this image.

This image only contains Apache httpd with the defaults from upstream. There is no PHP installed, but it should not be hard to extend. On the other hand, if you just want PHP with Apache httpd see the https://hub.docker.com/_/php/ and look at the -apache tags. If you want to run a simple HTML server, add a simple Dockerfile to your project where public-html/ is the directory containing all your HTML.

Create a Dockerfile in your project

dockerfile
FROM httpd:2.4
COPY ./public-html/ /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/

Then, run the commands to build and run the Docker image:

console
$ docker build -t my-apache2 .
$ docker run -dit --name my-running-app -p 8080:80 my-apache2

Visit http://localhost:8080 and you will see It works!

Without a Dockerfile

If you don't want to include a Dockerfile in your project, it is sufficient to do the following:

console
$ docker run -dit --name my-apache-app -p 8080:80 -v "$PWD":/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ httpd:2.4

Configuration

To customize the configuration of the httpd server, first obtain the upstream default configuration from the container:

console
$ docker run --rm httpd:2.4 cat /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf > my-httpd.conf

You can then COPY your custom configuration in as /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf:

dockerfile
FROM httpd:2.4
COPY ./my-httpd.conf /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

SSL/HTTPS

If you want to run your web traffic over SSL, the simplest setup is to COPY or mount (-v) your server.crt and server.key into /usr/local/apache2/conf/ and then customize the /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf by removing the comment symbol from the following lines:

apacheconf
...
#LoadModule socache_shmcb_module modules/mod_socache_shmcb.so
...
#LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so
...
#Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf
...

The conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf configuration file will use the certificate files previously added and tell the daemon to also listen on port 443. Be sure to also add something like -p 443:443 to your docker run to forward the https port.

This could be accomplished with a sed line similar to the following:

dockerfile
RUN sed -i \
		-e 's/^#\(Include .*httpd-ssl.conf\)/\1/' \
		-e 's/^#\(LoadModule .*mod_ssl.so\)/\1/' \
		-e 's/^#\(LoadModule .*mod_socache_shmcb.so\)/\1/' \
		conf/httpd.conf

The previous steps should work well for development, but we recommend customizing your conf files for production, see https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/ssl/ssl_faq.html for more information about SSL setup.

Image Variants

The httpd images come in many flavors, each designed for a specific use case.

httpd:<version>

This is the defacto image. If you are unsure about what your needs are, you probably want to use this one. It is designed to be used both as a throw away container (mount your source code and start the container to start your app), as well as the base to build other images off of.

Some of these tags may have names like trixie in them. These are the suite code names for releases of https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases and indicate which release the image is based on. If your image needs to install any additional packages beyond what comes with the image, you'll likely want to specify one of these explicitly to minimize breakage when there are new releases of Debian.

httpd:<version>-alpine

This image is based on the popular [***] available in https://hub.docker.com/_/alpine. Alpine Linux is much smaller than most distribution base images (~5MB), and thus leads to much slimmer images in general.

This variant is useful when final image size being as small as possible is your primary concern. The main caveat to note is that it does use https://musl.libc.org instead of https://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html, so software will often run into issues depending on the depth of their libc requirements/assumptions. See this Hacker News comment thread for more discussion of the issues that might arise and some pro/con comparisons of using Alpine-based images.

To minimize image size, it's uncommon for additional related tools (such as git or bash) to be included in Alpine-based images. Using this image as a base, add the things you need in your own Dockerfile (see the https://hub.docker.com/_/alpine/ for examples of how to install packages if you are unfamiliar).

License

View https://www.apache.org/licenses/ for the software contained in this image.

As with all Docker images, these likely also contain other software which may be under other licenses (such as Bash, etc from the base distribution, along with any direct or indirect dependencies of the primary software being contained).

Some additional license information which was able to be auto-detected might be found in https://github.com/docker-library/repo-info/tree/master/repos/httpd.

As for any pre-built image usage, it is the image user's responsibility to ensure that any use of this image complies with any relevant licenses for all software contained within.