Docker Basics — Building and Deploying to EC2

Docker packages an application and everything it needs into a container. Same image, identical behaviour on any machine. This post covers building a custom nginx image and deploying it to AWS EC2.

Podman on Fedora

Docker doesn’t run inside a Toolbox container — kernel module restrictions. Podman is Docker-compatible and works natively on Fedora:

echo 'alias docker=podman' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Same commands, no workarounds needed from this point.

Building a Custom Image

docker-nginx/
├── Dockerfile
└── index.html

FROM docker.io/library/nginx:latest
COPY index.html /usr/share/nginx/html/
EXPOSE 80

docker build -t my-nginx:v1.0 .
docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name my-nginx my-nginx:v1.0

Open http://localhost:8080 — custom HTML served via nginx inside a container.

Pushing to Docker Hub

docker login docker.io -u janosqpdev
docker tag my-nginx:v1.0 janosqpdev/my-nginx:v1.0
docker push janosqpdev/my-nginx:v1.0

Use an access token instead of a password — created in Docker Hub account settings.

Deploying to EC2

Real Docker works perfectly on Ubuntu EC2 — no Podman workaround needed:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install docker.io -y
sudo systemctl start docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

docker pull janosqpdev/my-nginx:v1.0
docker run -d -p 80:80 --name my-nginx janosqpdev/my-nginx:v1.0

Open http://ec2-public-ip — the same image built on Fedora, running on Ubuntu EC2.

What I Learned

The container OS (Alpine, Ubuntu) comes from the image. The kernel always comes from the host machine. Same image runs on any Linux host — that’s the whole point.

Next: Docker Compose to manage multiple containers together.