Tag Archives: nginx

Defending the planet using docker and ssl

In the recent days I moved this blog to a new server mainly to fix the latest SSL issues like POODLE- , Heartbleed – and SSL downgrade attacks. In order to save money I used the free of charge startSSL.com-signed certificate, which offers to sign in private generated certificate sign requests for your main site and one sub domain.  This does not just keep the little padlock next to the address pane green but furthermore allows a higher rank in google searches in future.

But moving a blog from a physical server usually means a lot of programming pain: files have to be moved, databases exported and imported back again, configuration files need to be adjusted and so on. To avoid this unnecessary work in future I was researching some possible solutions. First of all, its nothing new at all – visualization and containerization are multiple years old technologies.   The most remarkable approach in my optionion is docker. Its more lightweight than VMWare or VirtualBox, while supporting most of the features they offer. With its help you can run multiple instances of linux machines on a (single) physical host. Besides that is a real security feature as it keeps every process inside its on container never allowing to affect the functionality of the others even during security breaches.

Its also possible to version a dockerized application and share them over github.  In case of wordpress there are multiple versions available: docker-wordpress by jbfink, docker-wordpress-nginx by eugeneware, both of them lack of dockers VOLUME support, but after adding this, they still saved a lot of work.

In conclusion this blog is now in its own container, using its own http nginx, mysql and php instances. The container in turn is made public by a ssl reverse proxy nginx, which in case its required can be supplied by varnish caching in future.