A reverse proxy, powered by Traefik, designed for Dockerized local development environments

Sometimes, you want to use domain names for your local development containers.

This repo is referenced in the following blog posts:

https://kimdcottrell.com/posts/5-steps-to-achieving-https-and-domain-names-for-docker-local-development-envs/

Starting this reverse proxy and accessing the admin panel

Firstoff, if you're running any webserver directly on your local machine, shut it down. It will cause port conflict errors.

With that done, add these domains to /etc/hosts. This may require sudo:

127.0.0.1   admin.traefik
127.0.0.1   whoami.traefik

Now you'e good to go. Run:

docker compose up --build (possibly with -d if you want to run this in the background so you can still use that terminal window)

And if things are working correctly, you should:

1. Be able to hit http://admin.traefik in your browser and see the Traefik dashboard
2. Be able to visit http://whoami.traefik in your browser (or curl for this one) and see an echoserver response

How to use with your application's local development docker-compose.yml

Add in your desired domain name to your /etc/hosts. This may require sudo. For example:

127.0.0.1 something.local.dev

In your OTHER docker-compose.yml file, where your application stack lives, edit things so the traefik labels are included, but alter apilocaldev to whatever you want it to be, and alter traefik.http.services.apilocaldev.loadbalancer.server.port to be the EXPOSE'd port inside your Dockerfile for that container's image. Make sure you also include the networks value and the reference to this container stack's externally-presenting network so your application stack can access it.

services:
  api:
    ...
    labels:
      # Explicitly tell Traefik to expose this container
      - traefik.enable=true
      # The domain the service will respond to
      - traefik.http.routers.apilocaldev.rule=Host(`api.local.dev`)
      # Allow request only from the predefined entry point named "web"
      - traefik.http.routers.apilocaldev.entrypoints=web # this is working with the port 80 entrypoint in the traefik config (a different docker-compose.yml)
      # Tell Traefik to use the port 8001 to connect to `protoinvestapi`
      - traefik.http.services.apilocaldev.loadbalancer.server.port=8001 # this can be anything, but mirror the change back to the Dockerfile
    networks:
      - proxy
networks:
  proxy:
    external: true

And if all goes well, you should be able to visit http://app.local.dev or whatever your domain name was in your browser instead of the usual http://localhost:1337 or whatever port you picked.

Relevant blog articles

How to use Traefik Proxy without exposing the Docker socket (HTTP Filter Edition)

Changes soon to come!

Self-signed Certs! This will allow for https-enabled localdev environments. e.g. https://app.local.dev