Using jwilder/docker-gen, based on the examples in jwilder/nginx-proxy, this project provides an automated Nginx Reverse Proxy for your containers.
See Automated Nginx Reverse Proxy for Docker for why you might want to use this.
To run it (with docker-composer)
$ docker-compose up -dNow start any containers you want proxied with an env var VIRTUAL_HOST=subdomain.youdomain.com
$ docker run -e VIRTUAL_HOST=foo.example.com ...Or set the environment in docker-compose.yml config
services:
my_web_app:
...
environment:
- VIRTUAL_HOST=bar.example.com
...The containers being proxied must expose the port to be proxied, either by using the EXPOSE directive in their Dockerfile or by using the --expose flag to docker run or docker create.
Provided your DNS is setup to forward foo.bar.com to the a host running nginx-proxy, the request will be routed to a container with the VIRTUAL_HOST env var set.
If your container exposes multiple ports, docker-nginx-proxy will default to the service running on port 80. If you need to specify a different port, you can set a VIRTUAL_PORT env var to select a different one. If your container only exposes one port and it has a VIRTUAL_HOST env var set, that port will be selected.
If you need to support multiple virtual hosts for a container, you can separate each entry with commas. For example, foo.bar.com,baz.bar.com,bar.com and each host will be setup the same.
You can also use wildcards at the beginning and the end of host name, like .bar.com or foo.bar.. Or even a regular expression, which can be very useful in conjunction with a wildcard DNS service like xip.io, using ~^foo.bar..*.xip.io will match foo.bar.127.0.0.1.xip.io, foo.bar.10.0.2.2.xip.io and all other given IPs. More information about this topic can be found in the nginx documentation about server_names.