🔗 Zero-downtime deployments with Docker Compose and Nginx

A few months ago, I worked on a project that utilized Docker and Nginx to deploy the product on Digital Ocean’s VPS. Everything at that time was quite primitive, I had to set up everything from scratch. From containerizing the application to creating a CI/CD pipeline to build, manage, and deploy different Docker image versions.

Docker is a great tool and I love using it in my workflow. I define the Docker services in the configuration file, then pull, up and down the containers to make sure they are up to date. But we have a problem: the time between when I down the container and when I up it. It took 2 minutes of downtime in total. That’s unacceptable for a product deployed for end-users.

So I implemented a Zero downtime deployment strategy for that project. The BLUE-GREEN strategy is a basic deployment process, but it’s great when simplicity gets the job done.

Now, let’s talk about some stuff.