Secure nginx proxy for local web development

Access multiple web-application running inside docker containers using urls like https://project.loc instead of http://localhost:3000.

1. Create webproxy network

docker network create webproxy

All Docker containers that you want to access via loc-nginx-proxy must be added to this network.

2. Add domains for your projects to /etc/hosts or configure dns-masq to resolve all *.loc to 127.0.0.1.

# /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 whoami.loc
127.0.0.1 project.loc qa.project.loc

3. Create docker-compose.yml for loc-nginx-proxy. On first run it will create self-signed TLS-certificate for '*.loc' domains (for example project.loc, qa.project.loc, api.dev.project.loc) and then will pass control to jwilder/nginx-proxy.

# ~/Projects/loc-nginx-proxy/docker-compose.yml

version: '2'
services:
  loc-nginx-proxy:
    image: dogada/loc-nginx-proxy:alpine
    container_name: loc-nginx-proxy
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro
networks:
  default:
    external:
      name: webproxy

4. Start loc-nginx-proxy.

docker-compose up - d

5. All docker containers that you want to access using nginx should be added to webproxy network and have VIRTUAL_HOST env variable, for example:

# ~/Projects/whoami/docker-compose.yml

version: '2'
services:
  whoami:
    image: jwilder/whoami
    environment:
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=whoami.loc
    networks:
      - default
      - webproxy
networks:
  webproxy:
    external:
      name: webproxy

Then if you start whoami project with docker-compose up -d you should access it by following url: https://whoami.loc. You may see a security warning because wildcard TLS-certificate for the domain is self-signed, but after accepting it secure connection will be established, and all Javascript APIs that require secure connection will be available.

Using this approach you can configure all your other Docker images that run web-applications to be served by shared loc-nginx-proxy.

If a docker container exposes several ports, you need to add VIRTUAL_PORT env variable with port number that loc-nginx-proxy should use.

Advanced configuration

Read more about nginx-proxy configuration: https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy

Building loc-nginx-proxy image

docker build -t dogada/loc-nginx-proxy -t dogada/loc-nginx-proxy:alpine -f Dockerfile.alpine .