Use case

We have several server applications in the same development environment, each application is bundled in a Docker container, e.g: "Container A" and "Container B".

With Docker those applications have the same IP address. One way to differentiate and access to an specific application is exposing different ports.

ip

Containers exposing the same IP address and different ports.

But that solution is a little bit confusing, does 8080 mean we are accessing to "application A"?

It would be simpler and easier to remind something like:

domain

Accessing applications by domain name.

Get that extra semantic value is much simpler than I thought at the beginning and you will see below.

How to Configure Multi-Domain Reverse Proxy

I said it is easy, because we almost have to do nothing, another container will do it for us, especifically we are going to use nginx-proxy, it will automatically generate the required NGINX configurations.

So, we will have 2 applications + 1 proxy, that is 3 containers.

domain

3 containers, 2 applications and 1 proxy

Note
 You can download the full example at https://github.com/carlosvin/docker-reverse-proxy-multi-domain.

Example Project Structure

docker-compose.yaml

Main configuration file describing architecture in previous picture.

a

Application A directory.

Dockerfile

Container A configuration file.

b

Application B directory.

Dockerfile

Container B configuration file.

View Project.

Architecture Configuration (docker-compose)

The relationships between containers is the most interesting part in this example.

docker-reverse-proxy-multi-domain/docker-compose.yaml
a:
  build: a (4)
  environment:
    VIRTUAL_HOST: a.domain.com (1)
  restart: always

b:
  build: b (5)
  environment:
    VIRTUAL_HOST:  b.domain.com (2)
  restart: always

nginx-proxy: (3)
  image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
  ports:
    - "80:80"
    - "443:443"
  volumes:
    - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro

  restart: always
  privileged: true

  1. Configure the domain name for app a.

  2. Configure the domain name for app b.

  3. From this line there is proxy configuration (copy/paste part).

  4. We tell docker-compose has to build Docker images within specified directory.

  5. For example, we are saying that docker-compose has to build a Docker image using ../b/Dockerfile file.

Application Image Configuration

a/Dockerfile
FROM httpd:2.4 (1)
RUN echo "<html><body><h1>A</h1>App A works!</body></html>" > /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/index.html (2)

  1. We import an image with an apache server.

  2. It serves a file that prints "Host A" as default page.

The configuration for application B is pretty much the same:

b/Dockerfile
FROM httpd:2.4
RUN echo "<html><body><h1>B</h1>App B works!</body></html>" > /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/index.html

Adding domain names to your development environment configuration

In Linux we just have to map the local address to domain names you have chosen, in the example a.domain.com and b.domain.com.

/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1    localhost.localdomain localhost
::1          localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
127.0.0.1    a.domain.com (1)
127.0.0.1    b.domain.com

  1. We just added last 2 lines.

Everything ready!

Now we just have to test the example:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up

The 3 containers are running now.

So we can open our favorite web browser and go to a.domain.com. It will show App A works!. If we go to b.domain.com then we will see App B works!.

App A works!
Figure 1. a.domain.com
App B works!
Figure 2. b.domain.com
Note
 In most of the Linux distros you will need privileges to run Docker commands (sudo).