Inception: My Infrastructure as Docker Compose

Hi! Inception is 42’s DevOps project: build a small web infrastructure entirely with Docker — and you are not allowed to pull ready-made images. Every container is built from your own Dockerfile on top of a bare Debian/Alpine base.

The stack

• NGINX as the only entry point, TLS-only (you generate the certificates yourself),
• WordPress + PHP-FPM in its own container, no web server inside,
• MariaDB with its own volume and users,
• All wired together with docker-compose: a dedicated network, named volumes for persistence, environment-driven configuration and health-conscious restart policies.

What it demystified

Writing the Dockerfiles yourself — instead of image: wordpress — forces you to understand what is actually inside: which process is PID 1, why daemonized services break containers, how PHP-FPM talks to NGINX over a socket, where the data really lives. Funny enough, this exact stack is what powered this very website for years — and the knowledge from Inception is what I still use today when deploying my own services with Docker and a reverse proxy.

Source code: github.com/Fatihcill/Inception