Kubernetes Project — Dockerize & Deploy a Static Website

This is my practice project for learning Docker and Kubernetes from scratch. The idea is simple: take a static website template (HTML/CSS), package it into a Docker image running Apache (httpd), then deploy that image to a Kubernetes cluster using a Deployment and a Service.

Why I built this

I've been learning the basics of containers and orchestration. Instead of just reading theory, I wanted to get hands-on: build my own image, run it in Docker, then go all the way through deploying it to Kubernetes so I could actually see the flow from building an image to it running in a cluster.

Project structure

.
├── Dockerfile          # image definition: web server + template
├── .dockerignore
├── k8s/
│   ├── deployment.yaml # Deployment for running the web pods
│   └── service.yaml    # Service to expose the pods
└── README.md

About the Dockerfile

The base image is Rocky Linux 9. I originally used centos:latest, but I later found out the official CentOS image on Docker Hub is deprecated and all its tags are EOL, so yum install would fail since the mirrors are no longer active. I switched to Rocky Linux because it's a drop-in replacement for CentOS, so none of my yum commands needed to change.

What the Dockerfile does:

1. Installs httpd, zip, unzip.
2. Downloads the Loxury static template from free-css.com directly at build time (ADD from a URL).
3. Extracts the zip, moves the contents into /var/www/html, then removes the leftover zip/folder that's no longer needed.
4. Runs httpd in the foreground so the container doesn't exit immediately.

Template credit: Loxury from free-css.com.

Running it locally with Docker

Build the image:

docker build -t loxury-web:latest .

Run the container:

docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name loxury-web loxury-web:latest

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

Deploying to Kubernetes

First, push the image to a registry (Docker Hub or any other registry you use), and update the image name in k8s/deployment.yaml (image: toriqnain/loxury-web:latest) to match your own image if it's different.

docker tag loxury-web:latest toriqnain/loxury-web:latest
docker push toriqnain/loxury-web:latest

Apply the manifests to your cluster (I tested this on Minikube):

kubectl apply -f k8s/deployment.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/service.yaml

Check pod and service status:

kubectl get pods
kubectl get svc loxury-web-service

If you're on Minikube, open the service with:

minikube service loxury-web-service

Notes / next steps

• Add livenessProbe and readinessProbe to the Deployment to make it more production-ready.
• Try switching from NodePort to Ingress once I learn more about Ingress Controllers.
• Multi-stage build to make the image smaller (it's still single-stage for now).
• Add a simple CI pipeline (GitHub Actions) to auto build & push the image.

License

The code in this repo is free to use for learning purposes. The Loxury template itself follows the license from free-css.com.