nginx-controller

This little project is inspired by the concept of kubernetes ingress controller. But running kubernetes just to host a few little tools is sometimes overkill. Sometimes you just want to have a few containers running, a reverse proxy in front of them and don't care much about it. This is where nginx-controller might help you. It inspects your running containers and looks for specific labels, and then generates an appropriate nginx configuration and requests certificates at letsencrypt. The configuration necessary should be minimal.

Configuration

docker-compose example

version: '3'
services:
  nginx-controller:
    image: dereulenspiegel/nginx-controller:v0.1.3
    restart: always
    ports:
    - "80:80"
    - "443:443"
    volumes:
    - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"
    - "/var/lib/nginx-controller"
    command: -email <your-email>

The important parts here are, that nginx-controller has access to the file /var/run/docker.sock? so it can connect to your docker daemon and listen for events. Also nginx-controller needs a place to store certificates and account specific data, which in this example is /var/lib/nginx-controller. Lastly you need to specify the email address you want to register with at letsencrypt.

container labels

nginx-controller will only proxy traffic to containers which have specific labels. These labels are also used to configure how traffic is directed to containers. Right now nginx-controller only supports one container per (sub)domain. Also containers should only expose a single TCP port, because nginx-controller will send all HTTP traffic to the first TCP port it can find on a container.

Label	Description
nginx-controller.akuz.de/host	Controls under which domain the container will be available
nginx-controller.akuz.de/path	nginx location which should be used
nginx-controller.akuz.de/port	Overwrite the discovered TCP port