author	title	summary	tags
Bretton Vine, Michael Gmelin	nginx-Consul	nginx-consul is a consul-integrated web server	web proxy nginx consul

Overview

This is a flavour containing the nginx load-balancing proxy with consul integration.

Please copy in your own nginx.conf file, the default setup is hard-coded example.

The flavour includes a local consul agent instance to be available that it can connect to (see configuration below). You can e.g. use the consul pot flavour on this site to run consul. If no consul instance is available at first, make sure it's up within an hour and the certificate renewal process will restart consul. You can also connect to this host and service consul restart manually.

Installation

• Create a ZFS data set on the parent system beforehand zfs create -o mountpoint=/mnt/nginxdata zroot/nginxdata

• Create your local jail from the image or the flavour files.

• Clone the local jail

• Mount in the ZFS data set you created pot mount-in -p <jailname> -m /mnt -d /mnt/nginxdata

• Place your nginx.conf.in in that path

• Adjust to your environment:

  sudo pot set-env -p -E DATACENTER= -E NODENAME=
  -E IP=
  -E CONSULSERVERS=''
  -E VAULTSERVER= -E SERVERNAME=server_name [-E DNSFORWARDERS=<none|list of IPs>]

The CONSULSERVERS parameter defines the consul server instances, and must be set as

• CONSULSERVERS='"10.0.0.2"' or
• CONSULSERVERS='"10.0.0.2", "10.0.0.3", "10.0.0.4"' or
• CONSULSERVERS='"10.0.0.2", "10.0.0.3", "10.0.0.4", "10.0.0.5", "10.0.0.6"'

The VAULTSERVER parameter is the IP address of the vault server to authenticate to, and obtain certificates from.

SERVERNAME is used in the server certificates SubjectAltName.

The DNSFORWARDERS parameter is a space delimited list of IPs to forward DNS requests to. If set to none or left out, no DNS forwarders are used.

Usage

To configure nginxyou must copy-in a nginx.conf file with your specific front-end and back-end parameters.

If you don't copy-in your own nginx.conf file, then please take note the default is a webserver listening to localhost.

Persistent Storage

Persistent storage will be in the ZFS data set zroot/nginxdata, available inside the image at /mnt

If you stop the image, the data will still exist, and a new image can be started up and still use it.

If you need to change the directory parameters for the ZFS data set, adjust the mount-in command accordingly for the source directory as mounted by the parent OS.

Do not adjust the image destination mount point at /mnt because nginx is configured to use this directory for data.