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

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 —

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

Traefik Dashboard

After reading this article, you will have a fundamental grasp on how to setup Traefik Proxy in your Docker Compose with a service.

And I strongly advise everyone to have the "traefik/whoami" service container ready for debugging request headers if something goes wrong.

Source: This blog is authored by Faiz Ahmed, Principal Technical Consultant at GeekyAnts. Originally published on Hashnode: Read here.