Deploying Nginx Reverse Proxy on Docker
Reverse Proxies are used to bring traffic to and from a web server in a protected part of the network. In the context of docker, we’ll be using the reverse proxy to have each web service be referred to using its own subdomain.
For example, a user will access sync.example-domain.com and be directed to the reverse proxy. The reverse proxy will then see this and forward the request to the appropriate container on the server.
An additional perk of using a reverse proxy here would be having consolidated logging across all of the services on your server, and for having a single point where protections such as IP allow listing can take place independent of the web services.
Configuring the Nginx Conf file
- Log Persistence was done by creating a volume to hold all the logs.
- Templating is enabled through the docker image’s custom function. More information can be found on the nginx docker page.
Building the container using docker-compose
Deploy the reverse proxy on your machine by pulling the repository, modifying the relevant environment variables in the docker-compose.yaml file and running docker-compose up -d to run it in daemon mode.
Future Improvements
As a proof-of-concept, this will work as it is. This still needs to have additional improvements such as SSL support. Updates will be done on the repository moving forward.