serve a gridsome website from within the container - node.js

Question

I have a static website built with gridsome, I'm experimenting with docker containerization and I came up with the following Dockerfile:
FROM node:14.2.0-alpine3.10
RUN apk update && apk upgrade
RUN apk --no-cache add git g++ gcc libgcc libstdc++ linux-headers make python yarn
ENV NPM_CONFIG_PREFIX=/home/node/.npm-global
USER node
RUN npm i --global gridsome
RUN yarn global add serve
COPY --chown=node:node gridsome-website/ /home/node/build/
RUN echo && ls /home/node/build/ && echo
WORKDIR /home/node/build
USER node
RUN npm cache clean --force
RUN npm clean-install
# My attempt to serve the website from within, build is successful but serve command doesn't work
CMD ~/.npm-global/bin/gridsome build && serve -d dist/
Gridsome uses the port 8080 by default, after running the container via:
docker run --name my-website -d my-website-image
It doesn't fail, but I can't access my website using the link: http://localhost:8080, the container stops execution right after I run it. I tried copying the ``` dist/`` folder from my container via:
$ docker cp my-website:/home/node/build/dist ./dist
then serving it manually from terminal using:
$ serve -d dist/
It works from terminal, but why does it fail from within the container?

Answer 1

The point of Gridsome is that it produces a static site that you can host anywhere you can put files, right? You don't need nodejs or anything except for a simple webserver to host it.
If you want to produce a clean production Docker image to serve the static files built by Gridsome, then that's a good use-case for a multistage Dockerfile. In the first stage you build your Gridsome project. In the second and final stage you can go with a clean nginx image that contains your dist folder and nothing else.
It could be as simple as this:
FROM node:current AS builder
WORKDIR /build
COPY gridsome-website ./
RUN npm install && gridsome build
FROM nginx:stable
COPY --from=builder /build/dist /usr/share/nginx/html/
EXPOSE 80
After you build and run the image with 8080->80 port mapping, you can access your site at http://127.0.0.1:8080.
docker build -t my-website-image .
docker run -p 8080:80 my-website-image
It's probably a good idea to set up a .dockerignore file as well that ignores at least node_modules.
$ cat .dockerignore
gridsome-website/node_modules