munjalpatel/nginx-proxy repository overview

nginx-proxy sets up a container running nginx and docker-gen⁠. docker-gen generate reverse proxy configs for nginx and reloads nginx when containers they are started and stopped.

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 jwilder/nginx-proxy

Then start any containers you want proxied with an env var 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 env var 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 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.

⁠Multiple Hosts

If you need to support multipe virtual hosts for a container, you can separate each enty with commas. For example, foo.bar.com,baz.bar.com,bar.com and each host will be setup the same.

⁠Separate Containers

nginx-proxy can also be run as two separate containers using the jwilder/docker-gen⁠ image and the official nginx⁠ image.

You may want to do this to prevent having the docker socket bound to a publicly exposed container service.

To run nginx proxy as a separate container you'll need to have nginx.tmpl⁠ on your host system.

First start nginx with a volume:

$ docker run -d -p 80:80 --name nginx -v /tmp/nginx:/etc/nginx/conf.d -t nginx

Then start the docker-gen container with the shared volume and template:

$ docker run --volumes-from nginx \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock \
    -v $(pwd):/etc/docker-gen/templates \
    -t docker-gen -notify-sighup nginx -watch --only-published /etc/docker-gen/templates/nginx.tmpl /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Finally, start your containers with VIRTUAL_HOST environment variables.

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