Since reading Rachel’s excellent tutorial https://perchrunway.com/blog/2…ker-for-local-development last year, I’ve been able to get several Perch-based sites running locally on Docker and it works really well.
However I’ve had less luck in getting the same Docker-based environment to work on a remote server. That was the target for me – do the environmental set-up once then be able to bring it up easily via docker-compose elsewhere.
I got tantalisingly close – my site was Dockerised and serving fine from my remote DigitalOcean server on http only – but the hump I couldn’t get over was to get LetsEncrypt secure certificate challenges to pass in order to serve the site over HTTPS. I tried hard but just couldn’t get the combination of Docker + Apache + LetsEncrypt to work. I ended up trashing that server and just building a new one with no Docker .
There seems to be more documentation out there for using LetsEncrypt/certbot in an Nginx + Docker environment, but the reasons I persisted with Apache were that:
i) the original tutorial was based on Apache;
ii) traditionally any Perch server config documentation has focused on Apache so Apache made sense; and
iii) I personally know Apache better.
Has anyone had any joy taking Rachel’s original post and successfully running it on your remote server, serving your site over HTTPS?
I’m about to start a new project and am thinking about having another crack at this but any tips to get me over the hump would be much appreciated! I’d also be happy to switch from Apache to Nginx if that works better for the remote server certbot part.
When I finally get there with this, I’m more than happy to write/share what I hope is a useful follow up piece to Rachel’s original post, sharing how to use that Docker Perch/Runway set-up both locally and on the remote server.