Traefik (pronounced traffic) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that integrates directly with your existing docker infrastructure. You can read more information about Traefik at their repository or by going through their documentation.

If you are like me, you might have many different projects running at the same time with various port bindings that often conflict, or are difficult to remember. This small setup was built to solve the challenges associated with managing dozens of different port bindings on local development with docker.

Instead of accessing your application at http://localhost:8005 you can now access it at http://containerName.test For example, if you had the following docker container running, your container would be available at http://whoami.test

docker run --rm -d --network=proxy --name=whoami containous/whoami:v1.3.0

System Requirements

This setup was built to support development on a Mac OS environment. You can likely tweak these settings to support other environments with a little research and configuration. This guide assumes you have the following:

• Mac OS
• Docker
• Homebrew

Setup

The following instructions will get you started with Traefik. All you need is this repository and the tool dnsmasq which will point the .test domain to localhost.

To start, clone this repository. I cloned it into $HOME/.config/traefik

Create a proxy docker network

docker network create proxy

Install dnsmasq to route .test domains to localhost

brew install dnsmasq

Add .test domain to dnsmasq configuration

echo address=/.test/127.0.0.1 >> $(brew --prefix)/etc/dnsmasq.conf

Create the following resolver at /etc/resolver/test

nameserver 127.0.0.1
domain test
search_order 1

Start dnsmasq through homebrew

sudo brew services stop dnsmasq && sudo brew services start dnsmasq

Generate certificates for .test domain

(cd certs && bash generate-test-cert.bash)

Run traefik as a container on the proxy network

docker-compose up -d

If your setup worked, you should be able to go to http://traefik.proxy.test (assuming you cloned this into a directory called traefik) and you will see the Traefik dashboard, which details all of the exposed services.

All docker containers that exist within the proxy network are proxied by traefik.

Docker-compose containers are hosted at http://(projectName).(serviceName).test and regular docker containers will be hosted at http://(containerName).test

To add a container to the proxy network in a docker-compose file, you can add the following to your compose file:

version: "3.3"
services:
  serviceName:
    networks:
      - proxy

networks:
  proxy:
    external: true

Enable TLS Support

Within your docker compose file, add the following labels to enable TLS:

version: "3.3"
services:
  serviceName:
    labels:
      # Enables redirect to https, replace `containerName`
      - "traefik.http.routers.containerName-insecure.entrypoints=web"
      - "traefik.http.routers.containerName-insecure.middlewares=redirect-to-https"

      # Enables TLS with a self-signed .test certificate, replace `containerName`
      - "traefik.http.routers.containerName.entrypoints=web-secure"
      - "traefik.http.routers.containerName.tls=true"

Custom Host Name

Within your docker compose file, add the following labels to use a custom host name:

version: "3.3"
services:
  serviceName:
    labels:
      - "traefik.http.routers.containerName.rule=Host(`custom-name.test`)"