How to Deploy an Nginx Docker Container Using Pulumi

If you’ve ever worked with Docker, you know how powerful it is for containerizing applications. But managing infrastructure through configuration files can get messy fast. This is where Pulumi comes in, allowing us to manage Docker containers with familiar programming languages like TypeScript.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how to deploy an Nginx container on Docker using Pulumi, including setting up your environment, writing the code, and deploying it.

What is Pulumi?

Pulumi is an infrastructure-as-code tool that lets you use real programming languages to define and deploy cloud infrastructure. Unlike traditional IaC tools like Terraform or CloudFormation, Pulumi supports languages like TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, and Go, making it perfect for developers who are more comfortable with code than configuration files.

Getting Started with Pulumi and Docker

Step 1: Install Pulumi and Docker SDK

Before we get started, you’ll need to install Pulumi and the Docker SDK. Run the following commands:

# Install Pulumi globally
npm install -g pulumi

# Install the Docker plugin for Pulumi
npm install @pulumi/docker