How to assign domain names to containers in Docker?

Question

I am reading a lot these days about how to setup and run a docker stack. But one of the things I am always missing out on is how to setup that particular containers respond

Answer 1

So, you need to use the concept of port publishing, so that a port from your container is accessible via a port from your host. Using this, you can can setup a simple proxy_pass from an Nginx that will redirect users.mycompany.com to myhost:1337 (assuming that you published your port to 1337)

So, if you want to do this, you'll need to setup your container to expose a certain port using:

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 training/webapp # publish image port 5000 to host port 5000

You can then from your host curl your localhost:5000 to access the container.

curl -X GET localhost:5000

If you want to setup a domain name in front, you'll need to have a webserver instance that allows you to proxy_pass your hostname to your container.

i.e. in Nginx:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name users.mycompany.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
  }
}

I would advise you to follow this tutorial, and maybe check the docker run reference.

Answer 2

Here is a one solution with the nginx and docker-compose:

• users.mycompany.com is in nginx container on port 8097
• customer-list.mycompany.com is in nginx container on port 8098

Nginx configuration:

server {
    listen 0.0.0.0:8097;

    
    root /root/for/users.mycompany.com
    
    ...
}

server {
    listen 0.0.0.0:8098;

    
    root /root/for/customer-list.mycompany.com
    
    ...
}

server {
    listen 0.0.0.0:80;
    
    server_name users.mycompany.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8097;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    }
}

server {
    listen 0.0.0.0:80;
    
    server_name customer-list.mycompany.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8098;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    }
}

Docker compose configuration :

services:
  nginx:
    container_name: MY_nginx
    build:
      context: .docker/nginx
    ports:
      - '80:80'
    ...

Answer 3

For all I know, Docker doesn't provide this feature out of the box. But surely there are several workarounds here. In fact you need to deploy a DNS on your host that will distinguish the containers and resolve their domain names in dynamical IPs. So you could give a try to:

1. Deploy some of Docker-aware DNS solutions (I suggest you to use SkyDNSv1 / SkyDock);

2. Configure your host to work with this DNS (by default SkyDNS makes the containers know each other by name, but the host is not aware of it);

3. Run your containers with explicit --hostname (you will probably use scheme container_name.image_name.dev.skydns.local)

You can skip step #2 and run your browser inside container too. It will discover the web application container by hostname.