Docker — How to simply manage your micro-services app with NodeJS

This repository is a support for the blog post : How to simply manage your micro-services app with NodeJs

Hi guy,

It’s been a while since I’ve played with Docker and today I want to share with you how to create a gateway for your micro-services with NodeJS.

If you are not familiar with Docker/NodeJS visit my old post “The 10 Minute Docker’s Intro”. It will be enough to have a good start.

Topic We want to create a website driven by 2 of docker’s containers :

Container 1 : NodeJS api provider Container 2 : NodeJS render the view (get the data from the container 1)

1. The NodeJS API provider (container 1) For this container, I found a ready to use image on the Dockerhub (thank you to @ptitdam2001 ) .

The container is a expressJs app with 2 routes :

/users Retrieve a list of events (yes.. this confusing) /users/:id Retrieve an event by id

Let’s pull the image.

docker pull ptitdam2001/node-rest-server

2. The NodeJS render (container 2) The container will render a simple view, more detail on the github repository.

Angular call : /api/users (index.html) to retrieve the data (We consider that we want to access to the container 1 by the prefix /api)

Let’s pull the image.

docker pull olivierodo/node-micro-service-front

3. The NodeJS gateway Container app

Let start the gateway, it’s very simple and based on 2 packages :

• Dockerode : Help to manage docker by api
• http-proxy : Help to create a proxy

Clone the repository : https://github.com/olivierodo/node-micro-service-gateway and run :

npm install

The purpose is simple :

every request like /api/* is sent to the container 1 All the others requests are sent to the container 2.

Run the app :

npm start

You can check the app at: http://localhost:3000

More details… We use a config file to lists our containers (config/default.json) :

Our script is trying to:

• Create and run containers based on the config file
• Start a http server to redirect the requests.

Simple, no?

I’ll let you check the code (see server.js).

This code is just a sample and NOT READY FOR PRODUCTION.

Final thoughts

Hopefully this tutorial helped you understand how you can use the Docker API or create a proxy within a NodeJS app.

Please let me know in the comments or if you had any trouble setting this up. Also if you have any ideas to improve it, just create a pull request.