In a previous post, I talked about setting up a Docker and NGINX-based server for running Docker-based web sites and applications. Now, I want to show my process for continuously deploying my apps with a single git push, leveraging the power of GitLab CI.

So I decided to rehost my homepage and a couple other web pages and apps on a new server. And since we’ve been using Docker and Compose for some projects at work, I thought, hey, this could be a neat clean setup for multiple apps hosted on a single machine without installing a ton of local dependencies and managing everything by hand. Here’s the story of how this went down, what I learned along the way, and how you can build the same setup without doing the same mistakes that I initially did.