jasonpincin / nginx

An Nginx container for container-native deployment and automatic backend discovery

Autopilot Pattern Nginx

A re-usable Nginx base image implemented according to the Autopilot Pattern for automatic discovery and configuration.

A reusable Nginx container image

The goal of this project is to create an Nginx image that can be reused across environments without having to rebuild the entire image. Configuration of Nginx is entirely via ContainerPilot preStart or onChange handlers, which read the top-level Nginx configuration from either the NGINX_CONF environment variable or Consul.

Running in your own project

Consult https://github.com/autopilotpattern/wordpress for example usage, or see the examples in the examples directory for deploying to Joyent's Triton Cloud or via Docker Compose.

Configuring LetsEncrypt (ACME)

Setting the ACME_DOMAIN environment variable will enable LetsEncrypt within the image. The image will automatically acquire certificates for the given domain, and renew them over time. If you scale to multiple instances of Nginx, they will elect a leader who will be responsible for renewing the certificates. Any challenge response tokens as well as acquired certificates will be replicated to all Nginx instances.

By default, this process will use the LetsEncrypt staging endpoint, so as not to impact your api limits. When ready for production, you must also set the ACME_ENV environment variable to production.

You must ensure the domain resolves to your Nginx containers so that they can respond to the ACME http challenges. Triton users may refer to this document for more information on how to insure your domain resolves to your Triton containers.

Example excerpt from docker-compose.yml with LetsEncrypt enabled:

nginx:
    image: autopilotpattern/nginx
    restart: always
    mem_limit: 512m
    env_file: _env
    environment:
        - BACKEND=example
        - CONSUL_AGENT=1
        - ACME_ENV=staging
        - ACME_DOMAIN=example.com
    ports:
        - 80
        - 443
        - 9090
    labels:
        - triton.cns.services=nginx