Automatic Nginx proxy config generator

This uses my docker-service-reporter container to generate an nginx config file defining virtual hosts that proxy to docker containers with appropriate labels.

How?

The service-reporter container populates etcd with details about known containers.

This container monitors etcd for a label specifying vhosts and proxy ports, and puts them into a template file for nginx to use.

Labels

You must label any container that you wish to proxy. The following labels are understood:

• com.chameth.proxy=<port> -- specifies the port on the container that the proxy should connect to
• com.chameth.proxy.default -- identifies the container that will receive traffic if no others match
• com.chameth.proxy.protocol=<protocol> -- the protocol to use when connecting to the container. Optional, defaults to HTTP.
• com.chameth.vhost=<host> -- the virtual host that the proxy will accept connections on. You can specify alternate hosts/aliases by separating them with commas.
• com.chameth.proxy.loadbalance=<gruop name> -- Load balance this container with other containers that have the same group name.

Usage

Create a named volume for your nginx config, if you don’t already have one:

docker volume create --name nginx-config

This should be mounted at /nginx-config.

Then run this container. It takes the same arguments as service-reporter:

  --etcd-host (default: etcd) hostname where ectd is running
  --etcd-port (default: 2379) port to connect to ectd on
  --etcd-prefix (default: /docker) prefix to read keys from
  --name (default: unknown) name of the host running docker

And some additional arguments:

  --cert-path (default: /letsencrypt/certs/%s/fullchain.pem) path to the SSL cert.
  --trusted-cert-path (default: /letsencrypt/certs/%s/chain.pem) path to the CA certs used in SSL stapling.
  --cert-key-path (default: /letsencrypt/certs/%s/privkey.pem) path to the SSL cert's private key.

For certificate paths, ‘%s’ will be replaced with the (primary) vhost for each site.

So running the container will look something like:

docker run -d \
  --name service-nginx \
  --restart always \
  -v nginx-config:/nginx-config \
  csmith/service-nginx:latest

Config files

The container will write out the config to /nginx-config/vhosts.conf (which should put it at the root of the nginx-config volume if you’re using the configuration described above).

Each service has an include directive that allows site-specific config files to be placed in a directory. For example, if a container has a vhost label of example.com,www.example.com, you can create a file at /example.com/foo.conf in the nginx-data volume and it will be included within that site’s server block.

It’s intended that nginx-config is mounted under /etc/nginx/conf.d/ when running nginx so global configuration files can be placed alongside the vhost.conf file.