Becoming interested in Docker and Microservices I decided to give it a shot and replace my classic Nginx/Nextcloud installation by something containerized.
In my research I came across traefik. It acts not only as a HTTP reverse proxy, and as a load balancer. It can also dynamically detect running microservices and create routes to them. One of my personal favourites is also, that it can automatically install Let's Encrypt certificates and route all traffic through https.
As a starter I studied the excellent DigitalOcean tutorial on a traefic/WordPress setup:
(Kudos at this point for DigitalOcean, for maintaining an excellent source of information with this blog)
I departed from this tutorial, to finally come up with a traefic/Nextcloud setup, including the MySQL database and an adminer container.
- A domain
- Ubuntu Server 16.04
- Docker
- Docker-Compose (handles the containers)
First of all create a project folder and go inside.
mkdir traefik
cd traefik
Before traefik is installed a passord hash needs to be generated, which will serve as the admin password for traefik.
sudo apt-get install apache2-utils
htpasswd -nb admin secure_password
Replace secure_password with your password you want to use for traefik. Copy the output, which you will use inside your traefic configuration.
Traefik is configured by a traefik.toml file
. Create it and edit it with
nano traefik.toml
The contents are:
defaultEntryPoints = ["http", "https"]
[web]
address = ":8080"
[web.auth.basic]
users = ["admin:passwordhash"]
[entryPoints]
[entryPoints.http]
address = ":80"
[entryPoints.http.redirect]
entryPoint = "https"
[entryPoints.https]
address = ":443"
[entryPoints.https.tls]
[acme]
email = "[email protected]"
storage = "acme.json"
entryPoint = "https"
onHostRule = true
onDemand = falseReplace passwordhash with the output you copied in the previous step, and enter your email address, which will be used for the Let's encrypt certificate generation.
The ssl certificate information will be stored inside acme.json. Therefore we need to create it:
touch acme.json
chmod 600 acme.json
Docker-composer will take care of starting up the docker containers in the right order with the right configuration.
First a docker network named proxy is created which will serve internally for the docker containers:
docker network create proxy
Then docker-composer is configured using a docker-compose.yml file:
nano docker-compose.yml
Its contents are:
version: "3"
networks:
proxy:
external: true
internal:
external: false
volumes:
nextcloud:
apps:
data:
config:
mysqldir:
services:
traefik:
image: traefik:1.4.4-alpine
command: --docker
container_name: traefik
hostname: traefik
labels:
- traefik.frontend.rule=Host:monitor.mydomain.com
- traefik.port=8080
restart: always
volumes:
- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
- /path/to/traefik/traefik.toml:/traefik.toml
- /path/to/traefik/acme.json:/acme.json
networks:
- proxy
ports:
- 80:80
- 443:443
nextcloud:
image: nextcloud
environment:
- MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
- MYSQL_USER=root
links:
- mysql
restart: always
volumes:
- nextcloud:/var/www/html
- apps:/var/www/html/custom_apps
- data:/var/www/html/data
- config:/var/www/html/config
labels:
- traefik.backend=nextcloud
- traefik.frontend.rule=Host:nextcloud.mydomain.com
- traefik.docker.network=proxy
- traefik.port=80
networks:
- internal
- proxy
depends_on:
- mysql
mysql:
image: mariadb:latest
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD:
restart: always
volumes:
- mysqldir:/var/lib/mysql
networks:
- internal
labels:
- traefik.enable=false
adminer:
image: adminer:4.3.1-standalone
labels:
- traefik.backend=adminer
- traefik.frontend.rule=Host:db-admin.mydomain.com
- traefik.docker.network=proxy
- traefik.port=8080
networks:
- internal
- proxy
depends_on:
- mysql
Replace all three mydomain.com occurences with your domain, and adjust the /path/to/ in the traefik volumes.
As you can see, traefik itself is coming as a docker container :)
Unlike in the DigitalOcean tutorial, I included the traefik container inside the docker-composer configuration file. Like that the whole setup can comfortably be started with one single command.
Next important step before starting, is to set the MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD variable with:
export MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=secure_database_password
Of course with replacing secure_database_password with your secure password. This password will be used to login to MySQL using adminer.
Time to run it.
docker-compose up -d
This should install and start all the containers specified in the docker-compose.yml. If there are problems it can be useful to run just docker-compose up which will give output on the console.
Now open up
(This might take a while, since traefik is going to install the Let's Encrypt certificates after the first start.)
You should be asked to enter your traefik credentials. Don't enter your hashed password, but your plain password here ;)
You should see now the admin panel of traefik.
Open adminer:
Here enter your root user credentials and use the mysql server. Inside create a nextcloud database.
Finally to setup Nextcloud open
https://nextcloud.mydomain.com
Choose MySQL as the database. In the database fields enter your root user credentials, and for the server use mysql:3306. If everything goes well, Nextcloud will generate your user and a MySQL user, and you should see soon the Nextcloud welcome screen.
If you want to stop the system a
docker-compose stop
will do.
Useful Links were
- Tuts
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-traefik-as-a-reverse-proxy-for-docker-containers-on-ubuntu-16-04
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-use-docker-on-ubuntu-16-04
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-docker-compose-on-ubuntu-16-04
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-remove-docker-images-containers-and-volumes
- treafik docu
- docker-compose docu
- containers used