If you have experience of deploying a website chances are you are using either of Nginx or Apache as your reverse proxy. These two are great web service and mostly can accommodate your needs. But in this article I want to show you one alternative that you can try, it is Traefik.

Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer designed to deploy microservices with ease. If you are a developer who also does deployment this article is for you. To make this article short, I will assume you already have some basic concepts in deployment and also understand docker environment.

So let's get going.

We will built one simple application that consist of frontend application and backend application to serve some data as an API. We will be using Traefik as a reverse proxy that will map the user request to the appropriate application. So there will be three separate docker container like below diagram.

Building The Application

We will build the app as simple as possible because we want to focus on the deployment. So first thing you need to create a new folder project, then create simple-backend and simple-frontend folder inside it.

Frontend

On the frontend side we only make simple html and javascript application that request data from the backend API.

Inside the simple-frontend folder create index.html.

 <!-- index.html -->
 <!DOCTYPE html>
 <html lang="en">
 <head>
     <meta charset="UTF-8">
     <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
     <title>Simple App</title>
 </head>
 <body>
     <h1>Simple Frontend</h1>
     <div id="data-container">
         <!-- Data will be displayed here -->
     </div>

     <script src="app.js"></script>
 </body>
 </html>

Create app.js to fetch data from the API and then render the data to the HTML using DOM.

 // app.js
 document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", fetchData);

 async function fetchData() {
     try {
         // below line will fetch data to the simple-backend container
         const response = await fetch('http://simple-backend.local/data');
         if (!response.ok) {
             throw new Error('Network response was not ok');
         }
         const data = await response.json();
         displayData(data);
     } catch (error) {
         console.error('Error fetching data:', error);
     }
 }

 function displayData(data) {
     const dataContainer = document.getElementById('data-container');
     // Example: Displaying data as a list
     const ul = document.createElement('ul');
     data.forEach(item => {
         const li = document.createElement('li');
         li.textContent = item.name; // Assuming each item has a "name" property
         ul.appendChild(li);
     });
     dataContainer.appendChild(ul);
 }

Create Dockerfile to build simple-backend docker image. We are using nginx to serve index.html as a static file. This works because the API fetching are done in the browser by javascript.
```
 # Dockerfile
 FROM nginx:alpine
 COPY . /usr/share/nginx/html
```

Backend

On the backend side we will make API with Express JS.

Inside the simple-backend create npm project
npm init -y
Install express and cors
npm install express cors

Add the index.js code

 // index.js
 const express = require('express');
 const cors = require('cors');
 const app = express();
 app.use(cors());
 const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;

 // Sample data
 const data = [
   { id: 1, name: 'Item 1' },
   { id: 2, name: 'Item 2' },
   { id: 3, name: 'Item 3' },
 ];

 // Route to get data
 app.get('/data', (req, res) => {
   res.json(data);
 });

 app.listen(PORT, () => {
   console.log(`Server is running on port ${PORT}`);
 });

Add the Dockerfile

 # Dockerfile
 FROM node:alpine
 WORKDIR /usr/src/app
 COPY package*.json ./
 RUN npm install
 COPY . .
 EXPOSE 3000
 CMD ["node", "index.js"]

Deploying The Application

We already have backend and frontend applications with its separate Dockerfile. Now we need to create docker compose to build the image from the Dockerfile and also config the reverse proxy using Traefik. I will explain the configuration inside the file.

# docker-compose.yml
version: '3.8'

services:
  simple-proxy:
    image: traefik:v2.5
    container_name: simple-proxy
    command:
      - "--api.insecure=true"
      - "--providers.docker=true"
      # Entry points are the network entry points into Traefik
      # They define the port which will receive the packets
      - "--entrypoints.web.address=:80"
    ports:
      # Using port 80 in local machine to expose reverse proxy entrypoint
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"
    networks:
      - simple-network

  simple-backend:
    # Below line will build the image from simple-backend Dockerfile 
    build:
      context: ./simple-backend
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: simple-backend
    container_name: simple-backend
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"

      # Router rules are a set of matchers configured with values
      # In this case if the incoming request host match with simple-backend.local
      # The router then forwards the request to the service
      - "traefik.http.routers.backend.rule=Host(`simple-backend.local`)"

      # The service load balancer receive requests from routers
      # Then it load balance the request into multiple instance of programs
      # But in this case we only had one instance in port 3000
      - "traefik.http.services.backend.loadbalancer.server.port=3000"
    networks:
      - simple-network

  # The frontend configuration is the same as backend configuration
  simple-frontend:
    build:
      context: ./simple-frontend
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: simple-frontend
    container_name: simple-frontend
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.frontend.rule=Host(`simple-frontend.local`)"
      - "traefik.http.services.frontend.loadbalancer.server.port=80"
    networks:
      - simple-network

networks:
  simple-network:

Notice that we are using dummy domain for frontend and backend application. In order to our application can resolve the dummy domain, we need to add these domains at /etc/hosts if you're using Linux or Mac, or c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts if you're using Windows.

# /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1    simple-backend.local
127.0.0.1    simple-frontend.local

We can build the docker image by
docker compose build

Run the container
docker compose up -d

Then access the app on simple-frontend.local or simple-backend.local/data.

Just like that. Thank you!

Reference:

https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/

Iwan Prakoso's Blog

Iwan Prakoso's Blog

Easy Deployment with Docker Traefik

Table of contents

Building The Application

Frontend

Backend

Deploying The Application