Træfɪk is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease. It supports several backends (Docker 🐳, Swarm 🐳🐳, Mesos/Marathon, Consul, Etcd, Zookeeper, BoltDB, Rest API, file...) to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically.

Example usage

Start Træfɪk on a Windows Server 2019 or Windows 10 1809.

docker-compose up -d

And finally, you can access to your whoami server throught Træfɪk, on the domain name {containerName}.{configuredDomain}:

PS C:\Users\stefan\code\dockerfiles-windows\traefik> docker-compose up -d
Starting traefik_whoami2_1 ... done
Starting traefik_whoami1_1 ... done
Starting traefik_traefik_1 ... done
PS C:\Users\stefan\code\dockerfiles-windows\traefik>
PS C:\Users\stefan\code\dockerfiles-windows\traefik>
PS C:\Users\stefan\code\dockerfiles-windows\traefik> docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                           COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                                                              NAMES
113ce8f5c552        stefanscherer/whoami            "\\http.exe"             32 minutes ago      Up 4 seconds        8080/tcp                                                           traefik_whoami1_1
44c88c5055f0        stefanscherer/traefik-windows   "/traefik --configfi…"   32 minutes ago      Up 4 seconds        0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:443->443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp   traefik_traefik_1
88673d7e3c03        stefanscherer/whoami            "\\http.exe"             32 minutes ago      Up 4 seconds        8080/tcp                                                           traefik_whoami2_1
PS C:\Users\stefan\code\dockerfiles-windows\traefik> curl.exe -H Host:whoami.docker.local http://localhost
I'm 113ce8f5c552 running on windows/amd64
PS C:\Users\stefan\code\dockerfiles-windows\traefik> curl.exe -H Host:whoami.docker.local http://localhost
I'm 88673d7e3c03 running on windows/amd64
PS C:\Users\stefan\code\dockerfiles-windows\traefik>

The Dashboard UI http://localhost:8080 will give you an overview of the frontends/backends and also a health dashboard.

Never expose the API/Dashboard UI publicly (https://docs.traefik.io/configuration/api/#security).

Documentation

You can find the complete documentation here.

Use with Let's Encrypt

Edit the config files:

• Change the email to your email address
• Change yourdomain.com in both traefik.toml and docker-compose.yml to your registered domain name.

For example in Azure add a inbound rule for port 443 to your Windows VM.

Put the public IP address of your Azure VM to your A record of the DNS settings for your registered domain.

Put sub domains as CNAME as well, eg. whoami.

Add a firewall exception for the ports exposed by your containers. You need eg. port 8000 for the whoami containers so that traefik can talk to all the whoami containers.

Run docker-compose up and the acme.json file will be created and stored on your Docker host to keep the certificates. As there is a rate limit of 20 requests per week you should store this file on your host to persist it.

Now try curling the whoami

curl https://whoami.yourdomain.com

You should see two different Id's if you repeat the curl command.

Now scale the service

docker-compose scale whoami1=10

And run curl again several times. Now more containers will respond.