joaodubas/nginx-proxy repository overview

⁠nginx-proxy

nginx-proxy sets up a container running nginx⁠ and docker-gen⁠, that allow for nginx to be reloaded with a new reverse proxy every time a container is started or stopped.

This image is mainly a copy of the original⁠ work by Jason Wilder⁠, but rewritten to use the lightweight structure of nginx docker image⁠.

See Automated Nginx Reverse Proxy for Docker⁠ for why you might want to use this.

⁠Usage

To run it:

docker run -d \
    -p 80:80 \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock \
    joaodubas/nginx-proxy

Then start any containers you want proxied with an environment variable VIRTUAL_HOST=subdomain.youdomain.com

docker run -e VIRTUAL_HOST=foo.bar.com ...

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 environment variable set.

⁠Multiple Ports

If your container exposes multiple ports, 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 environment variable to select a different one. If your container only exposes one port and it has a VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable set, that port will be selected.

⁠Multiple Hosts

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.

⁠Volumes

To make it easier to also use this image to serve static content, one can mount additional configurations files in the folder /opt/nginx-proxy/sites-static.

By default, docker-gen⁠ will generate configurations based on nginx.tmpl⁠, if a different template needs to be used, mount a volume in /opt/nginx-proxy/nginx containing the nginx.tmpl.