Mar 17, 2025

Setting Up Traefik Proxy with Docker Compose: A Step-by-Step Guide

Learn how to install and configure Traefik Proxy in Docker Compose. Set up entry points, enable service discovery, and use the Whoami container for debugging.

Technology

Author

Faiz Ahmed FarooquiPrincipal Technical Consultant.

Setting Up Traefik Proxy with Docker Compose: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Table of Contents

In this post, I'll show you how to install Traefik Proxy — the cloud native application proxy in our Docker Compose file and utilize it in our architecture with a sample service container. Traefik Proxy was discussed in my previous post — How much do you know "Traefik" proxy?

As a baseline, I'm assuming you're familiar with Docker and Docker Compose files.

Let's get started —

Docker Compose

Add the following content to your docker-compose.yml file

Details (of the content mentioned in Docker Compose file)

Replace localhost with your own domain or sub-domain in service container whoami
Run docker-compose.yml file by using the command docker-compose up -d
Your server should be up and running. Visiting http://localhost:1337/whoami, will show you all request headers
I'm using Traefik's whoami service as an example, it is a tiny Go server that prints os information and HTTP request to output

The above mini snapshot shows how we define entry point in Traefik
This allows us to "open and accept" HTTP traffic

The above mini snapshot shows how we configure & expose Traefik's API and Dashboard.
By default, Traefik will listen on port 8080 for API requests
This is a fully optional step; we may disable the Dashboard and secure APIs if you do not want to.

To enable and customise the log and it's level, we can use the command as mentioned above
Accepted values, in order of severity - DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL & PANIC

To enable docker as a providers for Traefik configuration, we set the value as true against providers.docker
If we want to enable all the service containers within the docker-compose file, we can set the value as true against providers.docker.exposedbydefault
But, I'd recommend to not expose all service containers unless really needed
If choose to not explicitly expose all your service containers, then you'd need to enable each container service by setting traefik.enable as true
To allow request only from your predefined entry point, we set traefik.http.routes.whoami.entrypoint with the name value we defined in our traefik service - in our case, it is web