Over a weekend I had a quick play around with the config provider to traefik, experimenting with reverse proxies. I'm fairly familiar with the redis-cli and it's fairly easy to build a redis client in any language so getting off the grounds is a 10min job at most.

I've always got redis container running locally, so I'm sticking with that, to get this running I do:

docker run --name some-redis -p 6379:6379 -d redis

Since I am running traefik on docker-compose and I'll need it to connect to redis, I have to create a network and redis should be connected to this network:

docker network create mynet
docker network connect mynet some-redis

The next step is the compose file for traefik:

# docker-compose.yml
version: '3'

networks:
  maunet:
    external: true

services:

  reverse-proxy:
    image: traefik:v2.5
    command:
      - "--api.insecure=true"
      - "--providers.redis"
      - "--providers.redis.endpoints=some-redis:6379"
    ports:
      # HTTP
      - "80:80"
      # Web UI
      - "8080:8080"
    networks:
      - maunet

And up:

docker-compose up -d

The traefik frontend should be accessible at 127.0.0.1:8080.

Configuration

A few of the traefik concepts didn't make sense at first, but it didn't take long to understand what they're talking about.

• I have another container running a simple rest server, it's serving on port 3000 which is exposed at port 53782 this container is called 'some-server'.

• A hurdle that took me a while to figure out was to also connect this container to the network we have traefik and redis running on:

docker network connect mynet some-server

• I need to tell traefik a service (server) exists:

set traefik/http/services/<service-name>/loadbalancer/servers/0/url "http://some-server:3000"

• Now assign this service to a router:

set traefik/http/routers/newroute/service some-server

• Lastly give the router a rule: (Note those are backticks around the forward slash.)

set traefik/http/routers/newroute/rule "Path(`/`)"

Now hitting 127.0.0.1:80 will forward the request to your server. You can also do all the other interesting things that traefik provides like loadbalancing and stripping path prefixes.

References

• https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/routing/providers/kv/