tuxbox server template

Your own personal Linux "server" for this course, running as a Docker container on your own laptop.

Start by clicking "Use this template" on GitHub to create your own copy of this repo, then clone that instead of this one.

Setup

git clone <your repo's URL>
cd docker-server-template

Check .env.example — if you want to change any of the values, copy it to a new file named only .env and do your changes there before building the container.

docker compose up -d --build

The container prints the exact ssh command to use once it's ready — check with docker compose logs. By default it's:

ssh student@localhost

Password: changeme123.

Use docker compose stop / start to pause/resume — avoid docker compose down, which throws away everything except your home directory.

FAQ / things that work differently here than on a "real" server

• No systemctl. This image doesn't run systemd. Start/stop services with sudo service <name> start|stop|restart instead.
• Services don't come back after a restart on their own. There's no init system to bring them back up — just start them again with service.
• Firewall tools (ufw, iptables) won't behave like a real host firewall due to how container networking works, so they're out of scope here.
• Only your home directory and /var/www persist across a full rebuild. Everything else resets to the image's contents if the container is removed and recreated - so e.g. installed packages (apache2, etc.) need reinstalling after a rebuild, but web content you put in /var/www survives.
• halt/reboot/poweroff/shutdown don't work. They rely on an init system (systemd) running as PID 1, which isn't the case here, and containers don't have the privilege to actually halt/reboot anyway. To stop your server, run docker compose stop (or down) from your host.
• No IPv6. Docker's default network is IPv4-only regardless of your host's own connectivity, so ping -6 and similar won't work.