How to use Docker with reverse proxy?

When you are working with Docker and reverse proxy, you are always looking for the easiest way to implement your reverse proxy.

There is a lot of information on the web about this topic, but sometimes it's hard to understand. Let's look at some of the best practices.

Why do we need reverse proxy? As it was mentioned before, we have 3rd party sites that we want to expose. But these sites can be not reachable from outside (maybe you use VPN or have a dynamic IP address).

Docker is a service that allows us to deploy an application on any server, no matter what operating system it is running. So it can be deployed on Windows, Linux or MacOS. We can do that by using containers and images.

We will use Docker images as containers. There is an example of this in my previous article.

What is the simplest way to expose web server? The easiest way to expose a web server is to create an instance of nginx container. You can use it as a reverse proxy for our other web servers.

Dockerfile. Dockerfile is a template for building your own images. You can find an example of this in my previous article.

The first thing we need to do is to create Dockerfile. The file should contain instructions for building the image. In this case we will use nginx.

Can you use nginx as a reverse proxy?

I want to use nginx as a reverse proxy.

I've read a lot of articles about this, but I can't really find a clear answer. Is it possible?
If it's not, what is the most common way to do this? It is possible to use nginx as a reverse proxy, yes. It's fairly straightforward to set up, but there are a few caveats: nginx has to be installed on the server being proxied. You will need a separate nginx instance for this nginx has to be able to access the proxied server's filesystem (you can make that configurable, but you need to be careful with security implications). Nginx has to be able to accept HTTP requests on the local port being proxied. You can make that configurable, but it requires a bit of work nginx has to be able to receive the response to a request from the proxied server, and deliver it to the client. This can be configured in various ways, and is often the most difficult part of the configuration. It's also not guaranteed to work with all HTTP clients.

I don't think there's a "best way" to do it - it's more of a "one size fits all" kind of thing. I usually start with a working nginx instance and then configure it to handle the proxy in one of a variety of ways.