This is a standard NGINX Docker container configured to act as a reverse proxy on ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) for a backend Web application container.
Production Docker environments almost always place reverse proxies in front of Web application containers. This allows the environment to deploy an application's containers to different hosts without changing the endpoint used to access them.
While local development environments usually run all containers on a single host, it may be important for some applications to reproduce a similar reverse proxy setup in development. For example, an application may try to detect the IP address of the client or whether the client issued the requiest via SSL. The logic required to do this changes when a proxy sits between the application container and client. To implement such features correctly a reverse proxy is required in the development environment.
Pull the reverse proxy image from Docker Hub:
docker pull daemonite/nginx-rproxy
Run your application container
docker run --name myapp <...>
Run the reverse proxy container, publishing ports 80 (and 443 if needed) and linking to your application container using the alias backend:
docker run -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 --link myapp:backend daemonite/nginx-rproxy
Requests to the published ports on the Docker host will then be forwarded to the application.
The reverse proxy sets the following HTTP headers on forwarded requests:
Hostis set to the Host header sent by the client (which may not be the hostname used by the proxy)X-Real-IPis set to the client IP addressX-Forwarded-Foris set to the list of IP addresses the request has been forwarded for. This includes the client and any proxies preceding the current proxyX-Forwarded-Protois set to the URL protocol of the original request (usually eitherhttporhttps)
The bundled configuration assumes the backend application listens on port 80 for HTTP and port 443 for HTTPS.
The dummy SSL self-signed certificate is generated every time the image is built. This will cause your browser to issue a warning after every update of the proxy's Docker image.
For more information on configuring NGINX as a reverse proxy, read the NGINX Reverse Proxy Admin Guide.
This project is provided compliments of Daemon and made available under the MIT license.