nginx-proxy sets up a container running nginx and docker-gen. docker-gen generates reverse proxy configs for nginx and reloads nginx when containers are started and stopped.

See Automated Nginx Reverse Proxy for Docker for why you might want to use this.

To run it:

docker run --detach \
    --name nginx-proxy \
    --publish 80:80 \
    --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro \
    nginxproxy/nginx-proxy:1.6

Then start any containers (here an nginx container) you want proxied with an env var VIRTUAL_HOST=subdomain.yourdomain.com

docker run --detach \
    --name your-proxied-app \
    --env VIRTUAL_HOST=foo.bar.com \
    nginx

Provided your DNS is setup to resolve foo.bar.com to the host running nginx-proxy, a request to http://foo.bar.com will then be routed to a container with the VIRTUAL_HOST env var set to foo.bar.com (in this case, the your-proxied-app container).

The containers being proxied must :

• expose the port to be proxied, either by using the EXPOSE directive in their Dockerfile or by using the --expose flag to docker run or docker create.
• share at least one Docker network with the nginx-proxy container: by default, if you don't pass the --net flag when your nginx-proxy container is created, it will only be attached to the default bridge network. This means that it will not be able to connect to containers on networks other than bridge.

Note: providing a port number in VIRTUAL_HOST isn't suported, please see virtual ports or custom external HTTP/HTTPS ports depending on what you want to achieve.

The nginx-proxy images are available in two flavors.

This image is based on the nginx:mainline image, itself based on the debian slim image.

docker pull nginxproxy/nginx-proxy:1.6

This image is based on the nginx:alpine image.

docker pull nginxproxy/nginx-proxy:1.6-alpine

Please check the docs section.