nakoud

Access your Docker containers easily without port forwarding

flowchart LR
    client[Client]
    nakoud[nakoud-proxy]
    containerA[Container A]
    containerB[Container B]
    
    client -- HTTP/1.1 CONNECT --> nakoud
    client -- HTTP/1.1 GET --> nakoud
    
    subgraph network [Docker Network]
        nakoud -- TCP --> containerA
        nakoud -- HTTP --> containerB
    end

Warning
This product is still in development and for development environment. Do not use in any production environment.

Getting Started

Run the proxy

The nakoud proxy works as a HTTP proxy, to accept connections from your client. This will be the entrypoint of all connections to Docker containers, instead of port forwarding.

docker network create nakoud
docker run \
    -p '127.0.0.1:8080:8080/tcp' \
    -p '[::1]:8080:8080/tcp' \
    -v '/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:z' \
    --network nakoud \
    ghcr.io/siketyan/nakoud:latest

Run your application

You don't need port forwarding your application from now. To access through nakoud, run your application in the nakoud network, with a label to specify the FQDN to access using.

docker run \
    # No port forwarding (-p) is needed :)
    --network nakoud \
    --label 'jp.s6n.nakoud.fqdn=nginx.nakoud.local' \
    nginx:latest

Test the connection

Use telnet or some TCP client to test the connection.

telnet localhost:8080

Once you connected to the nakoud proxy, type these to request / from nginx (+ is what you type, - is what you receive):

+ CONNECT nginx.nakoud.local:80 HTTP/1.1
+
- HTTP/1.1 200 OK
- Content-Length: 0
-
+ GET / HTTP/1.1
+ Host: nakoud.nginx.local
+
- HTTP/1.1 200 OK
- Server: nginx/1.23.4
- Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 07:55:11 GMT
- Content-Type: text/html
- Content-Length: 615
- Last-Modified: Tue, 28 Mar 2023 15:01:54 GMT
- Connection: keep-alive
- ETag: "64230162-267"
- Accept-Ranges: bytes
- 
- <!DOCTYPE html>
- <html>
- ...(truncated)

Welcome to nakoud!

Roadmap

There are more things to do:

Other HTTP methods support than CONNECT method
Intermediate TLS certificate
Automatic FQDN without labeling (<container>.nakoud.local or something)
Docker Compose support (<service>.<project>.nakoud.local or something)
HTTPS, SOCKS proxy

... and more!

If you have an idea to improve nakoud, please file at Issues.

FAQ

What is "nakoud" from?

"nakoud" is originally from "nakoudo" which means a matchmaker in Japanese. The nakoud proxy receives a request from your client and intermediate it through Docker network. It looks like a matchmaker, and also it is a daemon; typically daemons are named with "d" suffix, so we named this "nakoud".